Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

Gimme Shelter

Saturday, December 16th, 2023

Threefold Cord in Action

Even if you know leftism is just a collection of Satanic brainwashing myths, it makes an impact when you see your beliefs proven right. This is normal when things God tells you are demonstrated right in front of you.

Leftism is rebellion against divine authority. That includes every form of leftism, including feminism.

Christians are supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and communicate with him throughout the day, submitting to him and listening to him. A man is supposed to be the anointed authority over his household, backed up by the authority of God. A wife is supposed to submit to both God and her husband.

A man and his wife are supposed to have different jobs. A man has the primary obligation to guide, provide, and protect. It’s a position of self-sacrifice. He provides a stable environment in which the wife and kids can thrive in safety. A woman is obligated to look after the house, and she is supposed to handle the bulk of childcare. The childen are supposed to submit to both parents as well as God. The dog submits to everyone. Satan and his fatherless imps are somewhere below the dog and the rats and roaches.

Before my wife got here, I had to do everything. Manage the business. Bring in the money. Look after bills and taxes. Look after the buildings and grounds. Shop. Cook. Clean. I had to buy a back scratcher.

Leftists hate it when you say this, but it’s true: men are not that great at homemaking. Our standards are completely different. Even if we are clean and orderly, the homes of unaccompanied men lack the peaceful, warm atmosphere of homes ordered by women.

I was reasonably clean, but I had a plastic folding table from Home Depot in my kitchen. I had plastic chairs around it. I had an ammunition press and a large cache of cartridges in the dining room, along with two benches and a lot of tools.

The garage was chaotic. I sprayed it with pesticide, I kept the garbage from backing up, and once in a while, I opened the doors and ran the leaf blower. That was good enough for me.

There was a lot of junk on the kitchen table, because I ate in the living room. Left to their own devices, men will eat in three places: the couch, the patio, and standing over the kitchen sink.

Walking in my master closet was very difficult because I had left a lot of guns and other junk in there.

I was tired of cooking, not because cooking was a lot of work, but because I also had to clean and shop. Sometimes I made good food, but often, I made things that were simple, that I could choke down in order to prolong survival. It saved me work.

I had $20 white sheets from IKEA. I got hooked on them while caring for my dad. Cheap and easy to bleach. On top of the sheets, I used either a quilt I found among my sister’s abandoned belongings when she moved to rehab, or a cheap Chinese electric blanket.

Things were good. Men are not like women, so I was okay with my standards. Things are better now, however.

My wife nearly freaked out when she got here, saying she could not be happy unless things were in order.

All junk was removed from the master suite. We went through things I had been ignoring, and we threw out stuff I should have dumped long ago. I was relieved to have the motivation and help. We laundered the pillows. We made several shopping trips for real bedding.

My wife emptied and cleaned my dresser and end tables, and she put things back in, in ways that made somewhat more sense. She vacuumed. She dusted. She organized the closet. There is so much room in there now, you could have home church in the closet. She goes in there to pray for long periods.

We emptied the kitchen cupboards and pantry. My wife cleaned, we threw stuff out, and things went back in. We got a rack that hangs on the pantry door, and we filled it with things like condiments and cookies. We like it so much, we have a second one on the way for the other door. The pantry seems three times as big now.

My friend Mike stayed here last year, and he left a household’s worth of junk and food-related things. We threw out a lot of expired Mike items.

She organized my laundry room, where I keep my paranoia shelves full of nonperishable food. They seemed full when she arrived. Now they seem empty. Simply moving stuff around made a big difference.

She attacked the garage. Mike had left a huge box of seasonings, oil, condiments, and other food items in there. Unbeknownst to me, he had left a box of starch and a box of confectioner’s sugar open, which explained why I had a roach problem in a garage where the garbage was always sealed up and dumped regularly. The box containing all the food items was full of roach poop and irate live roaches. I had to blast it with Raid and leave it alone for hours before I could put it in the car to take it to the dump. Roaches will colonize a car if you let them.

I sent Mike photos, and he said he wanted to save some things. Mike is a man, too. Everything went to the landfill.

Mike had left a couple of hundred pounds of random items in the room where I keep the piano. My wife moved it all into a smallish space in the garage.

I sold Mike my Moto Guzzi motorcycle a long time ago, in order to get it out of the garage. This plan backfired, because he left it where it was. Inspired by my wife, I put it outside under a tarp. We now have so much room, we can bring the pickup inside.

Mike keeps saying he’s going to fly down and haul his things off. I don’t know how long I can protect them from my wife.

My bathrooms were pretty clean, but now the cabinets are ordered. I redid the sink P traps, so now we are safe from leaks. My wife bought post-poop spray for use after people drop a deuce.

We plan meals together. We shop together. Generally, I cook. When I cook, I get to go sit down afterward. My wife cleans up the kitchen. That’s totally new. I can’t get used to it.

While I sit and she cleans, I can almost hear shrill, high-pitched voices with New York accents, telling me women aren’t supposed to do that.

Yesterday, she cooked a neat African meal. It was the first time she cooked an entire meal here. It was really good. I didn’t know she could cook. I got up to do the dishes afterward, and she sent me to the living room and cleaned the kitchen herself.

When I work on things like the tractors and the grounds, I don’t have to think about things I’ll have to do in the house later. I don’t concern myself with vacuuming or cleaning toilets. It’s all done for me.

I’m having problems with my old gate opener, so I have to keep opening it up and working on it. I have a kitchen cart I’m building, and there is still some welding and painting to do. While I work on things like that, my wife is in the house, imposing order.

I haven’t done a load of laundry in weeks. Clean clothing magically appears in the dresser. If I spill something on my shirt, my wife insists I give it to her and go get a fresh one.

I showed my wife how I clean toilets when she got here. Since then, I haven’t cleaned a single one. They’re always shiny and fresh-smelling, like only the angels used them. I’m not positive, but I think she keeps leaving the seats up. I’m afraid to ask. What kind of woman does that in feminist-ruined America?

We got on the living room. We looked at a zillion couches and chairs. We bought a really nice vintage rocker at a consignment store, which we visit frequently. I learned about Howard Restor-A-Finish, a product that works wonders on used furniture. I picked out a traditional wool rug like the ones my grandparents had, and we’ll get one after the turn of the year.

I’ve been on Ebay, buying traditional kitchen stuff. I got some old copper Jell-O molds for the walls. I bought some Griswold cast iron trivets to replace my mother’s trivets, which were looted and lost. I may pick up a few more century-old cast iron items.

We bought a bunch of picture frames, and we are putting family photos on the walls and coffee table. We have dedicated a hallway wall to future photos of friends and relations.

When my grandparents died, my relations took things that were ostentatious or valuable. I got my grandmother’s kerosene lamps. They’re worth around $30 each, but I remember seeing them on the mantel in her basement. We took them out and cleaned them up, and now they’re on our mantel, along with a couple of clay whiskey jugs I inherited. I’m considering putting an old butter churn on the hearth.

We go to the flea market and look for other vintage junk. Not something a man does when he lives alone, unless he has hopes of attracting another man.

I bought some vintage postcards of scenes I remember from Kentucky. I got a frame for them, and we’ll put it on a wall somewhere. I have a 1950 stamped postcard from the post office at the kibbutz where I worked. It commemorates the opening of the post office. We’ll frame that, too.

Furniture stores have sales in January and February. We plan to take advantage. We couldn’t find an old bedroom set we liked, so we chose one, and we will buy it next year.

Men create quarters. Women create homes. I would never have done any of these things had I not gotten married.

The difference is tremendous. The house seems bigger. It’s more peaceful. It’s a good place for prayer. I’m much more on top of business obligations, because now I have more time as well as a person who depends on me.

My wife doesn’t have to think about food, clothing, housing, protection, car problems, anything related to tools, or medical care. I don’t have to occupy myself with wife duties. It’s tremendous. It’s traditional. It’s correct. It works.

Of course it works. It was God’s idea.

Meanwhile, the US is full of 35+ career women–feminists–who live with cats, worry about their eggs, and put out because they think it’s the way to find husbands. They learned this from feminist leaders…who didn’t marry.

They’re miserable. They have no one to look after them. They have no one to look after. They have to compete with girls who are younger and therefore much more attractive. They think about buying ideal semen from tall, high-IQ, handsome strangers they will never meet and who are probably mostly transients and fast food workers. Women who bought the lie try to buy sperm from the kind of men who won’t marry them. They know most of their kind will die single.

Single men are better off than single women. Harsh fact of life. My life was very good before I met my wife. She was poor. She lived in a hovel with two other women. She had no reason to think kids were on the way any time soon, and she had no way to provide for them. I was sitting in a big house on a farm, enjoying my hobbies and my relationship with God, lacking for nothing except someone to pray with and make sacrifices for.

Our relationship is unusual in that she was in another country, but American single women are also worse off than single men. They are not as capable of looking after themselves as men. No one ever says, “It must be tough, being a man, living alone.”

They crave kids most men don’t crave. They have biological clocks, but it’s possible for a 100-year-old man to have kids.

My great-grandfather had 11 kids by his second wife, my great-grandmother. She was 15 when he married her, and he was already old. He and her father arranged his second marriage without consulting her. He married her on her 15th birthday, and they were married when he died at the age of 78.

He was about 55 when my grandfather was born. He ended up with 21 children. He was about 70 when his last child was born. Women can’t do that.

My great-grandmother was probably saved from additional children by menopause, not any deterioration on her husband’s part. Meanwhile, American women in their twenties are freezing eggs.

We pray together at least twice every day. We share testimony and revelation. We discuss the Bible. We help motivate each other.

This is a good system, but because I was raised in Satan’s world of sick relationships, somehow there is a part of me that feels I have to defend it. Like the part of me that used to feel like I was walking into porn theaters when I walked into gun ranges.

God’s system is right. It works. It’s for everyone.

I feel as though I am working harder than expected to make this home feel homey, and I think this is because the world is washed up. It’s a hard, cold place now, full of perversion and outright insanity. A traditional home is insulation from, and a counterbalance to, the filth of the persecuting, trans-worshiping, phone-addicted world, and it’s a reminder that we will eventually live in a world filled with God’s light and warmth.

I’m writing this not long after Jill Biden put out a stomach-twisting video of the left’s vision of a proper Christmas. You must have seen it by now. Christmas is supposed to be a sort of second Thanksgiving, in which we celebrate the gifts of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. It’s about the love of families. We celebrate these things in our homes, where we try to rekindle our warmth and love for each other. A home is never so much a home as it is on Christmas.

Ms. Biden’s video is a sickening parade of sexual oddities in bizarre costumes, with fake grins of the sort you would expect to see on kids high on molly, prancing among creepy decorations as though recreating the kind of thing an unsaved person might see while descending into hell after a Christmas Day overdose.

It’s terrible when the left tries to destroy Christmas, but it’s even more nauseating when they try to take it over. The Biden video has nothing in it to remind us of Yeshua. It’s full of dancers who are about as charming as horror movie clowns. Their insincere grins are supposed to be cheery, but they come off as threatening, like the grins of demons awaiting the arrival of the dead.

It reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for years: the distaste homosexuals feel for Christmas.

Young people may not remember it, but we used to hear a lot about the misery homosexuals endured over Christmas. Other people were celebrating with their husbands, wives, kids, and other relations. Homosexuals had nobody and no relationship with the God they knew detested their behavior. Christmas was a yearly reminder that a lifestyle of alcohol, drugs, selfishness, sex with feces-smeared anuses instead of vaginas, and too many sexual partners to remember was vastly inferior to normal heterosexual life.

I don’t know if it’s true, because self-pitying mythology was common, but they used to say many homosexuals committed suicide over Christmas, recognizing the emptiness of depravity and not knowing any way to be delivered.

The church has done an extremely poor job of delivering people from sexual perversion and compulsive fornication, but to be fair, not many people are interested in deliverance.

There is no way homosexual families will ever be “right.” It’s a hopeless quest, like putting a wig on Bruce Jenner, giving him a girl’s name, slicing his penis off, and expecting normal men to ask him out. It’s terrible when people give up everything to chase toxic mirages.

Jenner has actually complained that men don’t want him. It is astonishing that he didn’t expect that. You can put icing and candles on a cow pie and tell people it’s a birthday cake, but no one in his right mind will want to eat it.

There is a HUGE difference between a woman and a castrated man full of wrong hormones. Huge. Ask any man. The flesh feels different. The mannerisms are feminine, not effeminate. The mind is different. The skin has a different scent. Women don’t make noise when they walk. And women don’t have big man hands built for swinging swords and axes.

I think Biden’s video is motivated in hostility toward the “haves,” like all of leftism. Other people have decorations with crosses. They read the Bible to their kids. They look at manger displays. They hold hands and thank Yeshua, knowing he has prepared a perfect future for them. Leftists are out in the cold, so they try to make Christmas about nonexistent elves, a maladjusted fat man obsessed with other people’s kids, reindeer, trees, drunkenness, fornication, and gifts bought on credit, which assure a miserable New Year full of bills and interest.

I see Biden’s video as an act of aggression. It’s an effort to replace Yeshua and Christians with sexually ambiguous weirdos in costumes straight out of a child’s nightmares. Maybe it’s a deliberate effort to mock Christmas and Christianity. “It’s our White House now, and THIS is your White House Christmas.”

And the choreography and music are horrible.

All in all, I think a Christmas tree lighting ceremony ruined by perverts and angry Muslims is easier to watch.

How could “Dr. Jill” look at this video and not realize it was a belly-churning abomination?

“Dr. Jill.” The doctor of education. Like Bill Cosby.

I’m a doctor, too. I’m a doctor of law, like every lawyer under a certain age. I don’t go around making people call me “Dr. Steve.” Ridiculous. If you want people to call you a doctor, get a real doctorate. Become a physician or a mathematician. Learning how to teach kids to clap erasers isn’t the same as mastering neurosurgery or real analysis.

Shaquille O’Neal has a doctorate, and he insists the world is flat. He says he has seen it through airplane windows.

Dr. Shaq.

Great guy. An inspiration in many ways. Not a real doctor.

We need to stop questioning God’s guidelines. The person who created them is God, after all. He knows what works. His ways work. There are millions of normal families all over the world who do things God’s way, and they get results. They’re not buying sperm and cutting themselves.

I am extremely grateful for the change in my life. I wanted this even when I was a kid. I wanted it even after hormones kicked in, and other boys were only thinking about nailing up as many pelts as possible. I knew it was right, even though I was a terrible Christian.

I pity the people who won’t listen. It doesn’t matter how hard and long you suck on a poisoned pacifier. You will never get any milk.

Looks Like I’ll Have to Share the Stuffing This Year

Tuesday, November 14th, 2023

Mail-Order Bride Shipping Arrangements Made

Thanks, everyone who prayed for my wife to get her visa. They gave it to her this afternoon in Lusaka.

It’s an annoying story. They promised a response within 5 business days and then made us wait two weeks. It’s actually worse than that, because they didn’t do anything at all that we are aware of until she showed up yesterday at the embassy to find out what was going on.

I think they would have let our application go for weeks had she not visited the embassy. I believe we would still be waiting, and I also think she could have gotten the visa last week if she had gone earlier to shake them up.

She had a dream this morning. She was at her grandmother’s house, and a tall Arab dressed in white traditional clothes showed up and bombed the place. Somehow she knew he belonged to her church and attended regularly.

He had arrived on a private plane, and he left on one. He had authority behind him. He was rich.

It sounds bad, but her relatives on her dad’s side curse her and each other all the time. It’s a popular pastime in Zambia. When something good happens to someone in your family, you kill a chicken or whatever and curse them.

The immigration system is weird, as anyone who has seen luxury hotels full of illegals could tell you. I had to pay a new immigration fee today in order to get the green card processed. They should give you a green card when you get your visa, but they make you pay separately.

Looking for flights is annoying. We want her to go business class this one time in her life (until I croak). For $7000, I can get a somewhat better selection. For $5000 or less, I get a research project.

Orbitz offers a bunch of acceptable flights, but when you select one, it disappears or increases in price by a sizeable factor.

Skyscanner is supposedly one of the best flight sites now. We have also used Kayak a lot.

I found an acceptable flight, so we are all set.

Guess it’s time to shop for a turkey.

Still Flying Solo

Monday, November 13th, 2023

God Bless the Government

I guess the 4 people who read this blog are now wondering why my wife isn’t here in my house. I wrote some stuff suggesting she was going to arrive a while back.

New immigrants have to get visas in order to enter the US. Unless they’re criminal or terrorists who just walk across the border and then get many thousands of dollars’ worth of our money in order to help them remain here and burden us. Legal immigrants who do everything right have to be interviewed at American embassies or consulates. Generally, they get their visas within a few days of their interviews. Interview Monday, visa by the following Monday.

We were scheduled for an interview that was to take place almost a month ago. Then the embassy fired a bunch of employees for corruption, and perhaps not coincidentally, our appointment was postponed 10 days. She went to the appointment, they asked for a little more evidence to prove we were sincere, and they said they would get back to her within 5 business days of receiving it.

That was over two weeks ago. We emailed to ask if anything was wrong, and we got no answer. Today she went to the embassy to check on her application, and she was told to show up tomorrow at 2 p.m. “for collection.” This presumably means she is to collect her visa and green card, but she didn’t ask for clarification.

Barring the kind of miracle nobody wants, she will be on a plane this week. We are not going to wait around.

I hoped she would be here the first week of this month. Now I’ll be happy if she is here for Thanksgiving.

Of course, flight prices have gone up a thousand dollars. I don’t care any more. She’s not going to sit over there and wait so I can save a thousand dollars.

She got the impression that the people at the embassy had forgotten about her. They had to poke through their computer. Maybe they are having a hard time now that they have a smaller staff. I suppose it takes a while to replace skilled people.

We should have a visa and green card in hand by 9 a.m. tomorrow. We did everything right. We supplied tons of evidence. Normal life should start by the weekend.

After all this, of course, she will have to get familiar with operating the lawnmower and changing my car’s oil, and as for me, I will want a new recliner.

Okay; probably not.

If I never do another video chat in my life, it will be too soon. I look forward to praying with her in person for a change.

Shroom for Improvement

Sunday, October 1st, 2023

Fungal Bungles

Today I had an interesting experience involving photography and the lawnmower.

I was riding along beside the fence that separates the pasture from the yard, in a long, grassy strip that resembles a road. I looked ahead and saw a couple of clusters of mushrooms. They were pretty new. Ordinarily, I would have splattered them with the mower, but I realized I was seeing something I could photograph, so I mowed around them.

When I went back later, I realized I only liked one of the clusters, so I tried to take a few shots with a Sigma 105mm macro lens. I was carrying it because I hoped to find some small things to shoot. Smaller than mushrooms.

Fortunately, not every shot I take with this lens has to be a real macro shot. I was able to shoot from far enough away to get the whole mushroom cluster in the photo.

I shot some more stuff I will probably delete, and then I edited two raw photos. You see them below.

I’m reasonably happy. The focus is bad, because I keep overestimating the depth of field, but the pictures showed potential. I picked a fairly good subject, the composition is okay, and but for the depth of field issue, these pictures would have been pretty good.

I like editing raw photos. Seems like I can stretch my work a lot closer to adequate. I am using the trial version of Photoshop Elements, and I plan to buy it.

The second photo is a little disturbing to me, because Photoshop cropped it. I did a crop first, and then I saw that the program was recommending its own crops. A couple were hideous, but then I saw the third, which was just like mine, only better. So am I still a photographer if a program crops my photos?

I learned I should not be afraid to clean up the area around things I shoot. I thought the blades of grass in the foreground would add context, but they are just distracting.

I tried to get a shot of another mushroom I spared with the mower, but the depth of field problem was so bad, it’s not even worth posting. I need to make a strong effort to preview depth of field in the future. It’s not all that easy when you’re on the ground looking down at your camera, especially if the sun is bright.

I tried to shoot some little weed blossoms, but this lens is not great for really small subjects. Disappointing. There is a very good Chinese manual focus lens that could be better. It has 2x magnification.

I’m not afraid to give up autofocus. I don’t really like it. It seems like it’s not as trustworthy as manual, and it doesn’t always want to focus on the right thing. I can spend the rest of my life mastering the camera’s focus programming, and I guess I’ll get sharper shots than I get now, but I already know how to focus manually.

Great photographers took very good photos for decades with manual focus, so I feel like I should be able to pull it off.

I would like to shoot more bugs, but they don’t like to pose. I had an idea: pour sugar water on things and wait for the bugs to arrive. A weak solution should dry and become invisible, but the bugs should still smell it. I’m trying it now. Tomorrow I’ll go out and see if anyone has shown up.

I have to be more serious about recognizing subjects, I saw some interesting mushrooms at the base of a tree, and I kicked them to see if they were mushrooms or edible fungus. It wasn’t until later that I thought about taking a picture.

I also have to learn not to go out and shoot things on the ground right after dinner. It’s not the best time to be squatting and bending over.

These mushrooms should keep popping up until the cold weather comes, so I should be able to get some really neat photos once I figure the depth of field out. As it is, I am a disgrace to the body of people who own this lens, which is supposed to be excellent.

I could have done better with the DSLR, but I’m not going there. I have to master this camera.

Imagine if 75% of Americans put Their Shoes on the Wrong Feet

Wednesday, September 20th, 2023

Someone Wise Guy Would Sell a Product to Make Them More Comfortable

Yesterday, I resurrected my bush hog after several years, and I learned a few things that could help other people.

There are different names for bush hogs. “Brush hog.” “Rotary cutter.” “Brush cutter.” I call it a bush hog because that’s the term my grandfather used.

It’s a giant lawnmower you pull behind a tractor. A shaft connects it to the tractor’s motor, and a huge apparatus somewhat like a lawnmower blade spins underneath it, cutting weeds and even small trees. I call it a giant lawnmower, but it’s not for lawns. It’s for getting rid of stubborn plants you hate.

It’s a very crude tool, but when stuff gets deep, you need it. It’s also a cheap substitute for a flail mower, which is what you really want if you can afford it. A flail mower will really wipe out brush. It will have problems with saplings a bush hog will take down easily, though.

My bush hog is a 72″ model, so it’s very heavy. The tractor hitch keeps the front off the ground, and there is a little pivoting wheel in the rear that serves a similar purpose, although it’s perfectly okay to run the cutter with the rear wheel off the ground. I think it’s mainly there to keep the cutter from bottoming out.

When I tried to put my cutter back on the tractor, I ran into problems. There were two mysterious chains attached to the front, and I could not figure out where they attached to the tractor.

When I asked for help on the web, I was told these were “check chains” or “limiting chains.” They keep the rear of the cutter up. I was told you can omit the top link and rely on these chains instead. Because chains bend, they give when the rear of the cutter hits the ground, allowing it to swing up. This supposedly prevents pressure off the top link, which would otherwise be compressed.

It looks like this is a giant load of steaming BS. The chains appear to be unnecessary. My cutter, which is still made, doesn’t come with chains. The guy who sold it to me must have bought them.

There is a company that has gone so far as to manufacture these chains as a kit, complete with little bars to use to connect them at both ends. To me, this seems like selling people umbrellas because they’re too dumb to come inside.

My tractor’s first owner was a dentist. He and his wife seemed like wonderful people, but he was not a mechanical or landscaping genius. If you’ve seen the way he had my old brush fork tines attached to the tractor’s bucket, you know what I mean. It was a disaster. He used 4 turnbuckles to chain the tines to the bucket, bending it, and the tines were never rigid. They moved around all the time. He jammed two pieces of 4×4 in the bucket to resist the pressure from the chains.

The tines probably cost him two or three grand. They were made very well, apart from the design. They appeared to have been made in the USA. I didn’t care, because I could not stand using them any more. I cut them to pieces and reassembled them as one quick-attach unit, and it’s fantastic. I converted the bucket to quick-attach, too, so now I have two useful attachments instead of one attachment what works poorly.

If you can’t do steel fab, you are at a big disadvantage in this life.

I still have maybe 45 pounds of steel to throw out. Not sure what to do with 4 huge turnbuckles.

He also sold me a tractor with serious hydraulic leaks, which I cured in a short session with one wrench. Two fittings weren’t tightened enough. He told me I would need new fittings, or I could do what he did: top off the tractor after every use. Meanwhile, the shop floor kept getting oiled.

To get back on topic, I found out my cutter was put together wrong. This appears to be the sole reason it needed chains. I don’t think the chain company puts this information in its ads.

My cutter has a couple of flat bars that reach up to the tractor’s top link. At the top, between them, there is a U-shaped bar with two sets of holes in it. Whoever put this cutter together ran two bolts through the bars and the U-shaped part. In this configuration, the U-shaped bar serves no purpose, and it can’t move.

In reality, the U-bar is supposed to be held in place by one bolt. It’s supposed to swing freely. The other holes are for the top link pin. When the rear of the cutter hits something, the U-bar swings, allowing the cutter to swing upward.

I learned this stuff from a great video, which I will embed here. It will explain the situation so I don’t have to post pictures.

I learned something else about my bush hog. It has parts it may not need.

On the front of the deck, there is a bar with little places where short chains can be attached. There are only a few chains on the cutter now. They are maybe a foot long, and they hang down in front of the cutter, which is open so weeds can go in. It looks like they’re supposed to stop flying objects the blades kick up.

I used to think I should go to Tractor Supply and get more chains. I now suspect the dentist had a totally useless item welded onto his cutter. It’s obviously not factory.

When things are thrown out from under a bush hog, they can move pretty fast. I know this because there is a hole around 5″ long in the side of my bush hog. Something took off from under the cutter while he was using it, and it flew so fast it went right through steel plate. This probably happened right before he got the hanging chains.

It may be that the item that flew out was a piece of a blade. I think this is probably the case, because it left a long, thin hole. A rock would have left a round hole. Actually, a rock that small would surely have broken up.

I see some people on the web saying chains are great, but if objects can fly so fast they go through steel plate, what is a little wimpy chain going to do? Maybe they work. I don’t know. I plan to keep researching.

I don’t get off the tractor while the blades are moving fast, and I wouldn’t let anyone get near me while I’m using the bush hog. Best to keep them off the whole parcel where I’m working.

Hooking the PTO shaft up was no fun. The button that releases the coupler was stuck, so I had to hit it with a hammer. I got some good tips about making it easier.

I want to replace the shaft with a better one. Squirrels chewed up some plastic shielding around the shaft, and it looks like it’s so messed up it can’t be used without falling off. I don’t want to buy replacement parts if I can get something superior.

The shielding is hard to put on correctly, unless I’m doing it wrong. Far as I know, I have to use a huge screwdriver and pry a tough stainless ring out in order to remove the shields, and then I have to find a way to get it back in. I didn’t put it in yesterday, and the shields slipped back and let the weeds wrap up.

I only need to bush hog a couple of times per year. Thank goodness for that. But even at twice a year, I don’t want to spend 40 minutes attaching or detaching an implement.

If your bush hog is rigged up wrong, this post should be very helpful to you. If you know anything I don’t, let me know in the comments.

Post-Idalia Sitrep

Friday, September 1st, 2023

Spared

In case anyone cares, Hurricane Idalia came and went and did nearly nothing in my county. God was kind.

It was an interesting few days.

Even though I am in an area which has never experienced a true hurricane, we do get winds high enough to make a real mess. They don’t push houses over or throw cars around, but they can down enough trees to result in a cleanup effort that lasts months. Also, because I lived and owned houses in Miami, where hurricanes hit with their full force, I am conditioned to stress myself while observing the progress of storms. I know what it is to go days without running water and weeks without power.

If you own commercial property, or you own a home that’s part of a bigger common structure, hurricanes aren’t much of a problem for you. It’s hard for winds to damage warehouses and condos. A house is another story. Houses are built and landscaped stupidly, as though daring hurricanes to come through and ruin people’s lives.

It wasn’t until surprisingly recently that Florida had quasi-intelligent building codes for houses, and it still hasn’t caught up with regard to landscaping. You can build a house with 100-foot-tall trees 5 feet from the eaves, and no one will bat an eye.

Should the government be involved in telling you what kind of trees you can have, at your own risk? No, but people should be using common sense without the government’s involvement.

The house I live in now had a 40-foot maple tree about 15 feet from the garage when I moved in. Lightning killed it soon after I arrived, but I probably would have left it in place had it not been destroyed by nature. I should have planned to get rid of it as soon as I saw it.

I still have some big, feeble trees within falling distance of my house and shop. I’m considering hiring a company to come in and knock them all over so I can move them. They’re going to fall on their own sooner or later, with or without hurricanes, so I might as well get ahead of them. For $4500, I can get a whole day of work from a crew with some pretty impressive machinery.

The guy who built this house did some surprisingly stupid things. I guess the trees I have to get rid of now looked neat when they were smaller and stronger, and his wife probably insisted on leaving them where they were.

I’ve learned some things about tree removal. First, never pay a tree service. Tree services use wimpy tools to peck at large problems. A couple of outdoorsy-looking ladies who run a local service tried to charge me $800 to fell one oak without bucking or removing it. This would have been a 10-minute job. If I had to pay them to fell the other trees I don’t like, I suppose I would be looking at a $10,000 bill. That’s ridiculous. For $4500, I can get 8 hours of tree destruction, along with all sorts of trimming, ground grooming, and rock removal.

The $800 tree ended up costing me $0 to move. It was a tall oak that had broken about 30 feet up. The top part of of it got caught in another tree, so the top was resting horizontally on the other tree, waiting to fall on me if I cut the trunk.

I took a fishing pole and cast a weight over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a heavier line over the tree. Eventually, I had a tow strap and a chain attached to the tree, and I attached it to the tractor and yanked the tree down. Zero risk of injury and equipment damage. I used a chainsaw to get rid of the stump and waste wood, and that was that.

I like paying other people to do certain types of jobs, but if you’re going to yank my chain with an $800 bid for a job that will take you 10 minutes, I’m going to get creative and send you home with nothing. If these ladies had offered to do it for $250, they would have gotten my business, and I would have called them for all my future work. As it is, they will have to find comfort in the hollow victory of refusing to get realistic with their rosy pricing schedule.

I’m considering buying an excavator. I can get a decent one for $30,000. I wouldn’t buy a new one, because buying new equipment is stupid for amateurs and most professionals. An excavator would allow me to push most problem trees over, and I could also move trunks with it. I could remove all the annoying boulders in the yard and sell them for landscaping. I could pull stumps out quickly and easily. I could fix problems with soil distribution. I could build and repair berms and do light grading.

Biden and BRICS are probably going to destroy the dollar, so putting $30,000 into a machine that depreciates at a glacial pace is smarter than keeping the money in the bank. And who knows? I might even be able to make some money with an excavator if I had to.

I’ve pretty much decided that small landowners who don’t grow crops need two machines: a track loader, often misgendered as a skid steer, and a small excavator. A skid steer is a track loader with wheels. It’s not as good. It tears up the ground, for one thing.

A track loader can do everything a tractor can do except for farming, which I don’t do, and it does everything much, much better. It can lift at least twice as much for the same size machine. It can run bigger attachments. It can rip out stumps a tractor can’t budge. It can lift huge loads when rigged with a fork.

A track loader comes with a cage that protects the operator. A tractor will let things fall on you and kill you.

Track loaders cost more than tractors, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t need a track loader nearly as much as I need an excavator. The tractor, for all its shortcomings, does a whole lot of things reasonably well, and I improved it a lot by modifying it. If I can move soil, tear out stumps and rocks, and remove most trees with an excavator, it will be worth its weight in gold.

I’m always thinking of adding a building to hold stuff I don’t want to park in the rain. Problem: trees and rocks are in the way. With an excavator, I could clear the land myself, pretty easily.

As for Idalia, it made a big mess up the coast. I looked at videos of buildings besieged by storm surge, and it was disheartening.

The brutal truth is that most people who got flooded asked for it. It’s possible to build things on concrete stilts or raised mounds of fill, and people don’t do it, even though the cost of flooding is much greater than the cost of building correctly.

News stations always try to terrify us with claims that 12-foot storm surges are on the way. They’re not telling the whole truth.

First of all, the first three or four feet of surge only get the water up to the level of the ground in most of Florida, so those feet don’t count. Second, the worst storm surge I ever heard of in real life occurred during Andrew, and it was around 8 feet. This is a big deal if you’re right by the water and you built stupidly, but if you’re inland or you built correctly, it’s not a major problem.

If you go watch surge videos, you’ll generally see water coming up one to two feet on the sides of buildings very close to the water. Very bad, but not what the news nuts predicted. To listen to them, you would think houses were going to sink in up to their eaves. Real castastrophic, house-high storm surge is pretty unusual. You can find videos of it hitting places like the Bahamas, and it’s totally different from typical mainland Florida storm surge.

What they want you to think storm surge is like:

What it’s really like most of the time:

If you go on the web, you will see ridiculous stories claiming Katrina produced 28 feet of storm surge. Actual highest recorded value: 11.4 feet. Momentary waves aren’t storm surge. Flash floods from rain aren’t storm surge. Storm surge is standing water with a height that changes gradually. If 28 feet of water had gone across Mobile, it would no longer exist.

To Florida people, hurricanes are a lot like skin cancer. Except for melanoma, skin cancers are about as dangerous as hangnails, and you can cure them yourself with a can of computer dust spray and a Q-tip, in about two minutes. Floridians don’t get upset about them, but Yankees who get tiny basal cell carcinomas cut out have the gall to call themselves cancer survivors. As for storm surge, people who aren’t from Florida wave their arms and become incontinent when it’s mentioned, but most of the time, for at least 99% of the state, it’s not that bad.

I’m about 90 feet above sea level, I’m not in a flood plain (I checked before buying), and I’m in a place hurricane-force winds can’t reach. If I get my trees fixed up, hurricanes will mean nearly nothing to me. They don’t mean a whole lot now.

It’s terrible to see that people in Florida’s internal corner got surge flooding, but this is something you have to expect when you build a certain way. It’s not merely possible; it’s certain to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t make any sense to complain as though you had been hit by a meteor. You knew it was coming when you decided not to elevate your building.

I’m glad the storm is over, because I didn’t need any more stress after a 30-hour-long trip from Singapore. The flights alone accounted for about 24 hours, and the seats were like bricks situated under vises. The bricks pulverized my tailbone, and the armrests squeezed my arms against me. I made the mistake of buying exit row seats, and apparently, the seat bottoms are even less forgiving than the ones in the other coach seats. I was in real pain a lot of the time. A seat you can live with for three hours may seem a lot different after 10.

I think I also had coronavirus, which added to the suffering. I didn’t have a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or loss of my sense of smell, but I had a generally crummy feeling accompanied by the speedy and continuous accumulation of disturbing things in my nostrils. My wife had congestion and some throat problems, so I think I probably caught some of it, too. I wouldn’t have suspected anything had she not been sick.

Watching a storm approach is always draining, and combined with my other problems, it made for several unpleasant days during which I could not fully let go and recover from the trip. It was a little perfect storm that was reluctant to let go. Now I’m finally unwinding.

King of the Woods

Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

You’ll Have to Build Your Own

Today and day before yesterday, I used my new tractor fork to move a 70-foot oak. I feel like it’s safe to say this invention is a huge success and a giant improvement over what most people use.

The tines on the fork used to be 4 separate attachments. Each one had to be fastened to my tractor’s bucket with a chain and turnbuckle. They moved around when I used them, and I had to get on and off the tractor to put them back in place. When I tried to lift heavy things that were only a little wider than the gap between two tines, the tines would open up and drop the item. The chains were slowly destroying my bucket. It was stupid.

I hacked up the tines, discarding maybe 70 pounds of steel, including the chains and turnbuckles. I made a frame from heavy tubing, and I welded the tines to it. I made two plates that would connect to a quick attach adaptor, and I welded them to the frame. BANG. New fork.

If you look at it in a picture, it appears to be weak. You would think a heavy load would bend a tine downward. It looks like a blow to the side of a tine would bend it inward. No chance. I can stand on the end of a tine and jump up and down, and nothing happens. It’s much stronger than it looks.

A few days back, I was fiddling around in the woods, and I saw that a very tall tree had fallen across the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. It was stuck in another tree, so it leaned at about a 60-degree angle.

I had to move it. The road was unsafe with a big tree waiting to collapse on it. The cattle were in danger. Also, I didn’t want the leaning tree to destroy the tree that was holding its weight.

I went out with only a few tools. I had a hatchet, a tow strap, and an 18″ Makita electric chainsaw. Within about 90 minutes, the tree was flat on the ground, and I had moved about 15 feet of the trunk to the burn pile. By that time, the chainsaw batteries were dead, and I was dehydrated, so I quit.

Today I spent maybe two more hours, and I brought a timberjack so I could roll logs onto the fork. Now just about all of the tree is on the burn pile.

I had no problem lifting a 40-foot log that was about a foot thick on one end and 5″ thick on the other. This is the kind of thing buyers of $5000 grapples think is impressive. It’s like they have no idea a cheap, simple fork will do the same thing. I held the log up and sawed 5-foot lengths off each end until I had something I felt would be easy and safe to dump on the burn pile.

I could have carried the whole log to the pile, but that would have been dumb. Long objects can turn a tractor over if they’re not balanced right, and they can do funny things when dropped on a pile from 8 feet off the ground. Cutting the log up added maybe 10 minutes to the job, and it left me with a safer load.

I found something else the fork will do. If you lift the fork high and push it against a tree that’s rotten or just small, you can push it right over. No stump. The inner two tines prevent the tree from sliding out of the fork. The only problem is that the fork tends to slide up the tree. I can fix that by welding a piece of serrated steel to the frame to catch on tree bark.

I considered welding a hook to the frame in the same place, for chains and straps. I can’t do that if I put the log-catcher there. I can still put a hook on my bucket, though, and since I have a quick attach adaptor, switching to the bucket is fast and easy.

I’m thinking of things to do to my ballast box. This is a heavy steel box on the rear of the tractor. I put sand in it. It counteracts the weight of stuff on the front end loader and takes weight off the front axle. It’s not quite full of sand, and I can put a chainsaw and a few other things in the top.

I need more storage, however. I’m considering getting a Harbor Freight hitch cargo carrier. This is a cheap steel platform that goes in a trailer hitch receiver, like the one on my box. There are a couple of problems with these things. First, they are nearly bottomless. The bottom of a cargo carrier is just a few steel tubes several inches apart. I guess I could put expanded metal or plywood in it. The second problem is that cargo carriers can wobble around in receivers. I don’t know if that would bother me or not.

Right now, I have a big steel hook in the receiver. The purpose is to let me connect a strap, brush grubber, or chain, so I can do light pulling. I don’t think it’s a great idea to pull really hard on a ballast box receiver, but removing shrubs and little stumps should be no problem at all. If I don’t use the hook, I have to run the strap or whatever under the box to the tractor, and that’s kind of a pain.

Someone suggested I connect a short chain to the tractor’s drawbar. I guess I’ll do that. I will then be able to connect things to the chain without getting between the tractor and box. I’ll be able to rest the chain on the box or something when I’m not using it, so it will be handy.

I have considered buying or making a chainsaw holder. When I put a chainsaw in the box, I have to keep a scabbard with it. I have to make sure the scabbard is on the saw when it’s in the box so the chain doesn’t gouge things. Putting the scabbard on and taking it off gets to be inconvenient.

A company called Sawhaul makes a polyethylene saw holder you can mount on any flat piece of steel. It looks fine, but the price is insane. They want $150 for something that should cost $50, and people say the polyethylene gets torn up and has to be replaced. I’m thinking I might be better off making something from pressure-treated wood. I’m not sure. If I get a cargo carrier, a chainsaw holder will be pointless.

I’m also thinking of making a hook for my subsoiler. A subsoiler has a single bar of steel that goes down in the ground, and it has a flat blade attached to it. The bar has about a 45° bend in it. You can use the subsoiler to dig shallow trenches in a hurry. It’s also useful for lifting stumps, but because the bar has such a wide bend in it, it slips off the stumps. If it had a 90° bend, it would hold on and lift better. This would give me 3300 pounds of lift, concentrated on a very small area.

Stumps need vertical lift. They don’t resist it very well. They’re great at withstanding sideways force. Obviously, a 3300-pound lift will do more than a much smaller force applied at 45° from vertical.

A lot of guys use something called a stump bucket to remove stumps. This is a thing that looks sort of like the lower jaw on a tyrannosaurus. It goes on a front end loader. It has serrations where the dinosaur’s teeth should be, to prevent stumps from sliding off.

It’s a great tool. For a skid steer or track loader. A skid steer will lift several times what a tractor will, so the bad leverage you get from a long bucket out in front of a front end loader is not a problem. Stumps come flying out. A tractor can’t lift nearly well enough to make a stump bucket work well, unless the tractor is enormous. There are Youtube videos of skid steers and tractors using stump buckets, and the difference is disturbing, if you own a tractor. Guys on tractors have to nibble and nibble and nibble.

Tractor:

Skid steer:

A subsoiler with a hook would be very different from a long stump bucket. It would be right under the 3-point hitch, so no lifting power would be lost. If the tractor can lift 3300 pounds, I’ll get 3300 pounds of lift at the stump. I think it will work.

A guy in the Netherlands has a tiny Kubota with a front end loader attachment which is a single piece of plate steel on a quick-attach mount. The piece that does the work has a profile like a rhino horn. It seems to work much better than a stump bucket, probably because a bucket is a foot wide and spreads force out over a huge area. If he can do great things with a single piece of plate on a weak front end loader, I should be able to do much better with a subsoiler hook.

I bent my subsoiler working on stumps, so I welded gussets in and replaced the little lower pins with a solid bar of steel about three feet long. It should be way harder to bend now. If it does bend, I’ll reinforce it some more. Welders don’t have to put up with any BS from steel tools. It will do what I want, or I will add steel until it does.

Anyway, the fork is a total success. Wish I had had it 5 years ago. When you need the right tool, just buy it or make it. Don’t cuss and do nothing while life passes you by.

Grappling With Other People’s Bad Engineering

Saturday, June 10th, 2023

Cheaper, Better, Faster?

I am still trying out my new tractor debris fork.

I was worried that it wouldn’t be strong enough, because the tines are held on by welds at the very rear, where they experience a great deal of force when the tines are pushed up, down, or sideways. When I designed this thing, I considered putting struts between the tines, close to the back, to back up the welds.

Today I shoved the fork under an oak log about 15 feet wide and 18″ thick. I lifted one end off the ground with no trouble, and then I moved that end a few feet without hearing steel snap.

This suggests the tines will handle the heaviest loads I am likely to put on them.

I used the fork to remove a bunch of brush from the yard. Branches were growing this way and that, threatening to block Amazon trucks, and I also cut a magnolia that was growing in the wrong place.

Here’s a photo of the loaded fork.

I just can’t make myself believe an expensive grapple would hold all of that. I would guess there are about 200 pounds of junk on the fork, and that isn’t much, but look how much space it takes up. I’m pretty sure grapples only hold small loads.

Can it be that grapples are useless and overpriced? Sure seems like it.

I gathered, moved, and dumped two loads that size in maybe 20 minutes. It amounts to something like 1000 cubic feet of brush. Very easy. Think a grapple would have turned this job into 4 loads.

A grapple would cost somewhere between $2400 and $4000, before tax and shipping, and it would require additional hydraulics. Figure $5000 to do it right. For that, I would get…what? I could pick up logs. I can do that now. I could move debris. I can do that now, much faster. I could remove stumps, badly and slowly. I can do that with my sub-$200 subsoiler.

I see videos of guys scraping weeds off the surface of the ground with grapples, but a bucket will do that, and I have a bucket. Once the weeds are down, a fork will move them faster than a grapple, and switching from a bucket to a fork takes two minutes.

I think I did good here. I’m glad I didn’t blow thousands on a toy that wouldn’t do what the fork does.

Since building this thing, I learned that I could have bought a manure fork, which is very similar to this, for under $2000. Maybe I would have bought one had I found it sooner.

I’m extremely happy with this tool. I also bought a Kobalt cordless pole saw on sale for $100, battery and charger included, so I am taking branches down like nobody’s business. This pole saw only has an 8″ bar, but it will cut small stuff like butter, and because it’s cordless, it’s immune from socialist ethanol gas woes. When I want to use it, it will work. No carb cleaning.

The battery is only 2Ah, but I used it for about an hour, and it was still working when I put it on the charger. It may be a long time before I use my gas pole saw again.

Hard to think of anything else I really need right now.

Tractor Beaming

Tuesday, June 6th, 2023

The Apollo Program Took Less Time

Last year I converted my Kubota L3710 and bucket to quick attach, and that meant I could no longer use my crazy chain-on fork tines. I decided to cut them up and make a quick-attach fork.

Seeing the way the world was going to hell kind of killed my enthusiasm for a lot of things, but I got back to work this week, and now I have a nearly-completed tool. I haven’t finished the paint, and there are a couple of welds I still have to do, but I tried it out today on some fallen trees, and it seems to be okay. In an hour of slow-paced work, I moved a huge amount of stuff.

It gets better leverage than the old tines because it’s closer to the FEL, and these tines can’t move around because the whole fork is rigid.

One thing I didn’t think of: the bucket had a sloped rear surface, so when I used the forks, I was able to rotate them up maybe 20 degrees when the FEL was down. Now the tines are pretty much level when the fork is on the ground and the hydraulic rods are retracted. It doesn’t seem to slow me down, though.

I am thinking of welding some square tube crossmembers between the tines about 10″ from where they join the frame, to take stress off the welds at the rear.

I should be able to lift no more than 1200 pounds with this thing, based on Kubota’s specs and the weight of all the hardware. That’s the kind of load I have to think about when considering adding reinforcement.

I was considering putting goat fencing across the vertical members to keep things from coming back at me. It hasn’t been a problem in the past, but I suppose it could be.

I could have bought a grapple, which is a wide attachment with hydraulic jaws, but I think they’re stupid. They don’t hold much more brush than a person. They hold logs, but so will my fork, and I don’t have to add new hydraulics. Maybe a grapple is more useful on hills, where it’s harder to keep things on a fork. I doubt it. I think the grapple is just a bad invention.

In other news, I got more revelation yesterday and today. Whenever you pray in tongues a lot, revelation will follow within a day.

I saw a video about a Christian Youtuber who fell and injured himself. As background, he talked about how his faith was still tested sometimes. That’s remarkable, because years ago, he went to hell. He smoked some kind of synthetic weed and lost consciousness, and he found himself in hell. Apparently synthetic weed is dangerous.

You would think a person who had seen hell would never lack faith. That isn’t true, though. Believing faith works this way shows a lack of understanding of how the universe works.

Only the Holy Spirit makes us believe the truth. Similarly, our flesh, other people, and evil spirits make us believe lies. If you don’t hear from the Holy Spirit daily and get revelation, you can end up believing anything. This is why a big percentage of Westerners now think a man can be pregnant. It’s facially absurd, but very few people hear from the Holy Spirit, everyone hears from man and Satan, and man and Satan generally win.

It’s possible, and even common, for people to believe things they know are untrue. It sounds insane, but we have all seen it.

We even see it in the Bible. The Hebrews saw God part the Red Sea, and they saw him in a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire every day. They still lost faith, and idolatry became a huge problem for the Jews. Were they stupid? No. They just didn’t have the Holy Spirit inside them, reminding them of the truth every day.

Yeshua warned us about this danger in the parable of the sower.

After all I’ve experienced, I should have perfect faith by now, but I don’t. Sometimes it’s extremely strong, and sometimes it waivers. It seems like knowledge, which I have, should make my faith unshakeable. But knowledge doesn’t always become faith. Many people have seen miracles yet have not believed.

Yeshua told us about two dead Jews. A rich man and a beggar named Lazarus. The rich man was in hell, burning, and Lazarus was with Abraham, awaiting salvation. The rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus back to Earth to warn his brothers, and Abraham said, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”

What he said was true, and it explains why the descendants of Jews who didn’t believe are in the situation they’re in today.

1. They didn’t see Yeshua in the Bible, even though he was there. Isaiah said a virgin would give birth to a son, and he would be God. There are all sorts of verses pointing to Yeshua. His name, “Yeshua,” is all over the Psalms. Isaiah talked about him a lot. Moses was a type of Yeshua.

2. When Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, was resurrected by Yeshua, most Jews didn’t accept Yeshua. Instead, their leaders plotted to kill Lazarus. So a man named Lazarus really did come back from the dead, and most Jews would not be persuaded.

3. When Yeshua was crucified, many people rose from the dead in Jerusalem, but most Jews didn’t see it as a sign that Yeshua was divine.

4. Yeshua himself rose from the dead, and there were many witnesses, but most Jews were not interested. They didn’t know the Holy Spirit.

No matter what the objective truth is, you’re going to believe what spirits tell you, and only the Holy Spirit will tell you the truth. You have to keep hearing from him every day. This is why Paul said, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” He didn’t mean you have to listen to people recite from the Bible. He meant you had to hear God speaking, every day. When you pray in tongues, you hear God speaking through you, and the Bible says tongues build faith.

Unbelief is a delusion, like any other delusion. It’s not rational. Your mind can’t protect you. Only the Holy Spirit can.

It’s amazing to get all this revelation and to see what Bible passages really mean. Preachers get these things wrong all the time. Of course, most of them don’t know the Holy Spirit, so they don’t have a chance.

We now have unbelieving generations of descendants of Christians. The Jews rejected Yeshua, and our young people have rejected both Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. We’re going down the same road the Jews traveled, but this time, there is no fourth manifestation of God to come to Earth and give the world another chance. This time, the game is over.

The Psalms and other Old Testament books show that gentiles would believe in Yeshua and be saved, and this has happened. Now that Christianity is withering, there is nobody else to preach to. When the apostles gave up on the Jews, they went to the gentiles and had tremendous success. The gentiles are now turning away, and once both Jews and gentiles are lost, whom are you supposed to evangelize? Martians?

If you’re not speaking in tongues and hearing from God, you’re not going to make it. You’ll believe lies, and you’ll still think you’re among the elect. You’ll have lots of famous company. Maimonides thought he was special because he was so learned, and he’s burning in hell.

I hope people make good use of the things I share, because there aren’t many people broadcasting this stuff.

The person you really need to listen to is the Holy Spirit, not me, but I can help you get in touch with him.

Humanity Made it to 2022 Before I Invented the Tractor Debris Fork

Saturday, April 22nd, 2023

More Proof Engineers are Useless

I finally got back to work on my tractor fork attachment.

When I bought my tractor, it had 4 forks, or, more accurately, tines, on it. They were chained on with turnbuckles, and the chains went around the bucket. To prevent the bucket from deforming under the pressure of the chains, the previous owner shoved poorly-measured lengths of four-by-four into the bucket.

The tines worked extremely well, but they moved around all the time. It was not possible to tighten them enough to prevent this. Also, they were way out in front of the tractor, so the leverage was bad. They had to be mounted on the front lip of the bucket, so the distance back to the pins that attached them to the front end loader was pretty long.

On top of all this, in order to lift the fork, as I have decided to call the tines, I had to lift the bucket, which served no purpose in and of itself. The fork probably weighed 300 pounds, and that doesn’t include the bucket’s weight, which was probably maybe could be 150 pounds.

Let me check the weight of similar buckets.

The web says a bucket sold by Everything attachments runs 271 pounds, so I am off by a lot.

So before I could lift anything with “the fork,” I had to lift over 500 pounds of useless weight.

To make things even worse, the old bucket was held on by 4 hard-to-remove pins, and I could not use any other attachments without a ton of work. In practical terms, I couldn’t use the bucket because the fork was hard to remove, and I couldn’t use anything else because the bucket was hard to remove.

I got myself a thing that allows me to remove the bucket in about 90 seconds, and because covid, I was not able to get a bucket that worked with it. Instead, I did a lot of work and changed my existing bucket so it fit. This left me with a bucket I could use, but I was not able to use the fork, and the fork was what I needed for at least 95% of the jobs I did.

The answer: buy a new fork attachment.

No. Don’t be stupid. There is no such thing.

You can get a set of forklift forks for a tractor. They cost a lot, and you only get two tines unless you pay extra. The tines are short and poorly suited to moving logs and brush, and they move around if you use them the way I need to use them. Stupid.

You can’t move brush with two tines. You need at least 4 unless you want things to fall between the tines. I have a cheap set of two Chinese tines that clamp on my bucket, and while they are certainly helpful, they will never move brush.

You can get a thing called a grapple. This is like a 60″-wide set of salad tongs connected to hydraulics. People love them. I don’t. They are also stupid.

You can pick up logs with a grapple. So what? I can do that with the fork, and I can pick up more logs, because a fork is bigger. And I could handle loads that were much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple. You can pick up brush in a grapple. So what? I was able to move huge piles of brush with the fork. Again, much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple.

Also, to use a grapple, you have to add some stuff to your hydraulic system. To get something that isn’t as good as a fork without added hydraulics. And a good grapple weighs 400 pounds.

Grapples are dumb. I’m convinced of it. They cost a great deal of money, they require tractor modification, and they don’t work very well compared to a set of tines.

I think men buy grapples because they’re cooler than forks and because they don’t really know what they’re doing. When you have a grapple on your compact tractor, you can pretend you’re Truckasaurus, but you can’t really get much done. It’s amazing to me that no one offers a factory fork attachment like the one I’m building.

My answer: cut up my existing tines and attach them to a shopmade steel frame that works with a quick-attach adaptor like the one I now have. This will reduce the weight of the whole mess. It will move everything closer to the tractor, improving the leverage. The new attachment will be rigid, so the tines will not move around. I won’t have to change my hydraulics. It should weigh a hundred pounds less than a grapple.

Down side: it has been almost a year since I started working on it, and I am still not done because covid pretty much destroyed whatever ambition I had when I first realized I needed to do something. There is a lot of stuff on my property that needs to be moved.

So far, I have built the frame, cut up the forks, and primed and painted certain parts of the tines that will be hard to paint once the project is welded together. Over the last couple of days, I cut one tine up and did a lot of rust removal, priming, and painting.

I really do not understand how people who make tractor attachments can be so incompetent. You can go to Youtube and find shopmade fork things that are a lot like the one I’m building, so it’s not like I invented the transistor. If you use a grapple, and you’ve seen people use a fork, you know perfectly well that the grapple is inferior in every way. So why can’t I buy a fork ready to go?

I have 4 tines. They were originally maybe 6 feet long. Something like 4 feet extended out in front of the bucket, and the rest went under the bucket. When something heavy rested on a tine, the rear of the tine pressed up on the bucket. The idea was to add strength and provide a tine that would not bend where it met the bucket.

This was a stupid design. It added weight and complexity, and it required tight chains to pull the tines back against the bucket lip. This deformed the upper part of the bucket because the chains pulled down on it in spite of the pitiable four-by-four supports, which fell out all the time. This is what happens when a person who only knows how to run a wood band saw tries to do a job that requires steel and a metalworker. When all you know is carpentry, every job looks like a pine deck.

I can weld short pieces of heavy tubing in the corners of the tines to serve as gussets. If that won’t prevent the tubes from bending downward, nothing will. I will also put horizontal pieces of tubing in the corners to keep the tines from opening or closing.

I guess I shouldn’t be harsh. I don’t think the quick-attach adaptor had been invented when my tractor was new, so the old arrangement was probably the best the attachment companies could do. Still, why wasn’t the adaptor invented in, say, 1935 or soon after whatever year it was when hydraulic front-end loaders arrived on the scene?

My fork had 4 upright steel tubes to prevent things from falling back toward the tractor when the bucket was raised. This week, I de-rusted and primed two of them. I also put one on the hydraulic press because it was bent, and I got it nearly straight, which amazed me. I’ll be fixing the other two uprights shortly. It’s easy. If I get tired of the slightly-crooked one, I can make a new one in half an hour, or I can turn it upside-down, do a little welding, and have an upright that’s only crooked for the top 6 inches. That’s where the bend is.

Each upright member had a stupid spike at the top, facing forward at face level. When I bought the tractor, the two outboard spikes had tennis balls on them. I wondered why until the first time I walked into a spike. Today and yesterday, I used the belt grinder and the lathe to round the ends of the spikes. Why they had to be sharp in the first place is a mystery to me. Why no one ever thought to round them off later is also a puzzle.

My plan is to put the uprights back on the fork and then put some goat wire across all four of them. This is fencing wire laid out in a grid. The wire will weigh about 7 pounds and prevent things from coming back at me or the tractor between the uprights. Why no one else thought of this…well, I think we’ve already discussed the competence of the people who make tractor stuff.

I’m using rusty-metal primer on a lot of the attachment, and I’m finishing it with Herculiner. This is the toughest finish I can get, and it’s easily touched up with spray cans from Tractor Supply.

I assume this design will work. If not, I’ll get a grapple, and I’ll be out around $300. But why wouldn’t it work? The old system was held on with two brackets of 3/16″ steel channel about 10″ long. If lifting hundreds of pounds of wood using 4 pins on two little brackets with 4 little welds didn’t destroy everything, my relatively robust system should be a lot better.

When all this is done, I’ll have a bucket and fork I can swap in a minute or two, so I’ll actually use both. How nice that will be.

It seems like I excoriate engineers all the time for their stupid mistakes, but I think I’m completely justified. I have a physics degree and a small amount of common sense, but physics training in no way makes you an engineer. It enables you to pick engineering up fast, but it’s not the same thing. Physicists don’t know how to do anything. A physicist might be able to tell you how LED’s work at the subatomic level, but it takes an engineer to design an LED TV. If I can dramatically improve the work of engineers over and over, and I can, then something is wrong.

They always blame marketing and accounting. “We wanted to make it right, but the marketing and accounting people wouldn’t let us.” Boo hoo. I’m sure that explains a lot of problems, but it doesn’t explain many others. Why didn’t we have plastic trash bags until the 1960’s? Obvious? Why did American cars require two keys long after the Japanese realized only one was needed? Why have boat designers put so many bilge pump wiring blocks 6″ above the normal level of salty, conductive bilge water?

Why did it take so long for engineers to put seat belts in cars? They were invented in the 1800’s. The first American cars with seat belts appeared in 1949.

Engineers gave my car thin, easily-clogged moonroof drain tubes, and then they fixed it so any overflow was captured in headliner cavities containing overly-complex and expensive motors. An engineer gave my lawn tractor a front grill cover that falls off easily and lands directly in front of the tractor’s front wheels. Guess what happens then. Owners all over the web are looking for new grills.

My opinion of engineers is like my opinion of cooking school graduates. Think of all the terrible food you’ve had at expensive restaurants. Most of it was cooked by chefs with degrees. There is no conceivable excuse for going to school for several years and making bad food. Cooking is just not hard. Somehow, they blow it anyway. Very, very often.

Now I feel like writing about my awful green toilets again. I just spent $700 ordering a better one, made in Japan.

Unless I have missed something, my tractor fork will be fantastic. If so, I’ll probably come back and criticize engineers some more. They have it coming.

How Much for That Banana?

Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.

And On That Farm, he Had Some Beer

Friday, December 30th, 2022

A-I-AIO!

Yesterday was pretty interesting. I drove to Orlando to get beer ingredients and equipment.

I used to have all sorts of brewing items. A fermenting fridge. A freezer turned into a kegerator. Brew kettle. Lautering tun. Stir plate. Kegs. Gas bottles. Measuring stuff. When I left Miami, I had no help and a parent with dementia, so I must have thrown out or given away $10,000 worth of belongings, and most of the beer things went. Also, my kegerator died one day without warning, so that had to be hauled off.

Over the last couple of days, I rooted around, and I learned that I had a cornucopia of brewing paraphernalia. Here is a comprehensive list:

1. A brew kettle I no longer need.
2. A wort chiller I no longer need.
3. A hydrometer I no longer need.
4. A mercury thermometer I no longer need.
5. A control to maintain a high temperature in a freezer.
6. A $6 handle for lifting carboys.

So all I lacked was the other $90,000 worth of equipment.

Brewing used to be cheap, apart from equipment. I used to spend $20 for 5 gallons of the best beer on Earth. Best to me, I mean. People like different things for some reason. I nearly always ordered ingredients online. I placed orders large enough to get free shipping, so all was well.

This week, I went to Morebeer.com, which has apparently absorbed and digested some of the other companies I used to use. The cost for ingredients for one beer had shot up to close to $50.

I realize Joe Biden is president, and this is the beginning of the apocalypse, but that seemed unreasonable to me.

The problem was made worse by their unwillingness to sell me the amount I needed at a uniform price. If you need 9 pounds of a malt, you can’t order it. You can order 5 + 3 + 1, with the per-pound price going up sharply as increments shrink, or you can order 10 pounds and either throw out or try to store the excess. Holding onto extra grain is not practical. It’s mouse bait, it takes up room, and you have only 6 months to use it. Basically, you have to pay for something you don’t want.

On top of this, Morebeer charges about 10% to crush the grain in preparation for brewing. You can spend $160 on a machine to crush grain–one like the one I threw out–or you can pay as you go.

The nice thing about Morebeer is that they kill shipping on big orders, but by the time you’ve given them a lot more money than you want to, you’ve paid for shipping.

The local place I found 1) charges way less for malt across the board, 2) crushes it free of charge, 3) lets you order malt and hops in tiny increments, 4) bags things separately and labels the bags, and 5) charges about 40% less for yeast.

I probably spent $30 or more in tolls and gas yesterday, but I saved about $30 on ingredients alone, I got exactly what I wanted, I got it fast, and I was able to look around the store and see if I needed anything else. Yes, you can do that at Morebeer.com, but it’s not the same as being there in the flesh. You don’t have to scroll and flip pages.

During the drive, I prayed and listened to the Bible, which is what I always do in the car unless someone distracts me. Guess who I heard about? Naboth.

Talk about good timing.

Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth didn’t want to see. Ahab started crying, literally, so his wife Jezebel paid two losers to accuse Naboth of blasphemy. Naboth was stoned by a mob, and Ahab took the vineyard.

Why is this interesting? Because Naboth, a man who made wine, is the good guy in the story.

Please don’t try to con anyone with the idea that “vineyard” was a mistranslation. The Hebrew word clearly means a place where grapes are grown. Naboth wasn’t growing tangerines.

I really feel that God pushed me back into brewing, and I find it confusing, so I have been thinking and praying about it. Very often, when there is something I need to know, related material pops up on my car stereo. Looks like it happened again.

A lot of Christians are intolerant teetotalers. They insist that no Christian should ever drink anything alcoholic. I don’t know where they get this idea.

1. Jesus drank wine. Hello? He also ate meat. In fact, it was a sin for a Jew to be a vegetarian because of the Passover requirement. Jesus drank wine during Passover, which was months after the grape harvest, so fermentation had to have occurred.

2. The Bible says wine is a blessing. Psalm 104 says God gave it to make man’s heart glad. And no, doesn’t mean we’re glad because we’re not thirsty. Come on. Don’t torture the text.

3. Losing a vineyard’s production is a curse in the Bible. See Deuteronomy 28:39.

4. In Deuteronomy 14:26 the Lord commanded the Jews to have a feast and have “wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please.”

Back in Biblical times, Jews were not knocking themselves out in their vineyards because they liked table grapes or raisins. If they were excited about fruit, the Bible would be full of material about things like figs and pomegranates, and it isn’t. Wine and grapes are mentioned much more often. The Jews wanted wine. And God had no problem with it. Misuse of alcohol was what he hated. It has never been much of a problem among Jews.

Some Christians make the ridiculous claim that the wine ancient Jews drank was just unfermented grape juice. The problem with that is that ancient Israel had no refrigeration and plenty of hot weather. Heat plus grape juice and a couple of weeks equals wine. It takes considerable work for a low-technology person to eliminate or reduce grape juice fermentation in a hot climate.

It is very obvious that Christian teetotaling is a post-Biblical creation. At the same time, the Bible condemns drunkenness beyond any doubt.

Some of life’s pleasures are wrong all the time. Others are only wrong when they cause problems. Food and drink fall into the latter category. If alcoholic drinks cause you no problems, there is no reason to avoid them. If they do, you should abstain.

When I was young, I drank to get drunk. Often. It was one of life’s great pleasures for me. The thought of doing that now is repulsive to me. I remember the dizzy feelings and the way I smelled of alcohol. I remember the stupid things I did. I remember hangovers and vomiting. I don’t want any of that, ever. To me, now, alcohol might as well be mineral water, except for the taste.

Since the idea of returning to homebrewing arose, I’ve had several beers (never two in one day), but before that, I was having maybe two drinks per month. By “drink,” I mean a real drink, not a 14-ounce martini or a huge cocktail. I mean a small glass of sherry, a shot of expensive whiskey, or maybe a beer. If I couldn’t have another drink for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice. I keep alcohol on hand primarily for cooking. I use sherry for pork roasts and soup, whiskey for barbecue, beer for barbecue, and wine for lots of things.

Actually, I should come clean. I forgot that I had several beers and one gin and tonic in Singapore last month. I was in a foreign country, and I wanted to see what the beer was like, so there were times when I had one beer with a meal. I had the gin and tonic because tourists in Singapore are supposed to go to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and have cocktails.

Alcohol doesn’t cause me problems. It used to, but that ended a long time ago. There is no reason for me become a teetotaling legalist fanatic. Avoiding alcohol because it messes up your life is not legalism; it’s common sense. Avoiding it because you think God will put a black mark on a scoreboard in heaven is legalism. Christianity is not a game of points.

Listening to Naboth’s story made me feel a lot better. I don’t want to do anything God hasn’t told me to do, and alcohol has been involved in the destruction of many, many people. For example, my dad and his father were alcoholics. Also, I would prefer not to upset future guests any more than necessary. Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to get some kind of kegerator, and there it will be, in my house, staring people in the face.

You have to fear God’s disapproval, not other people’s.

I suppose many people think there is no reason to drink alcohol except to get drunk. That’s a problem of limited perspective due to lack of knowledge. If you’ve never had alcohol, or you’ve never drunk except to get hammered, maybe you could get the impression that alcohol has no other purpose. It’s not true at all.

It’s a lot like saying there is no reason to own more than one gun, which is like saying drugstores should only carry one medicine or there should only be one size spoon. It reflects unfamiliarity with the subject.

I have never been much of a wine person, but I know a little bit about beer. It’s an exhaustive topic.

Beers start with grain. Most beer is made from barley, but there are zillions of different barleys. Dark ones. Light ones. Barleys that provide sweetness to beer. Cheap, nasty barley for beers like Budweiser. Beers are also made with corn, oats, wheat, and rice. I’m sure you will find other things beer can be made from. Anything with starch should work. They all contribute different flavors and colors.

The next main ingredient is hops. There are many different varieties, and they taste different. There are American hops that taste like oranges, grapefruit, and lemons. There are European hops that taste like cloves. Using the wrong hop in a beer can ruin it. Adding the hops at different times during brewing also makes a big difference in what you end up with. Many recipes use more than one type of hop.

The last important ingredient is yeast. The Wyeast company, one of the two big suppliers, lists over 60 beer yeasts on its site, and there is a reason for that. They work at different temperatures. They produce different flavors. Yeast doesn’t just produce alcohol and gas. It produces chemicals that change the taste of beer.

With all the different ingredients and brewing methods, there are many, many very different types of beer. The range of flavors is staggering. They suit different occasions, seasons, and foods.

Anyone who thinks all beer is the same should try a weissbier next to an imperial stout and an IPA (India Pale Ale).

If you can understand why there are so many different wines in the world, you should be able to understand the reason for making different beers. No one with any brains would say champagne is interchangeable with chianti. You should be able to understand that it’s not about getting drunk. If it were, I wouldn’t ever have one beer by itself. Lovers of good beer are actually pretty sophisticated.

If I start believing God is against the brewing operation, I’ll sell my stuff and take the hit. I am not married to the notion. I can go either way.

My brewing appliance, a Braumeister 20L V2, should get here tomorrow. That means I may be brewing Sunday.

For anyone who is still reading, the Braumeister is a self-contained system, commonly known as a self-contained system or all-in-one. There are a bunch of these things on the market. I don’t think they existed when I quit brewing.

I picked the Braumeister because the others appear to have problems. The Braumeister is German and more expensive than most. Sometimes those things mean something. I have seen new ones prices at $3000, but the great thing about brewing is that guys give it up, so I found a lightly-used one for a small fraction of that.

AIO’s, to use brewer jargon, let you do everything but fermentation in one vessel. When I used to brew, I mashed first. This means I put the grain in a kettle of hot water so the enzymes in it would turn the starch to sugar. Then I moved it to another device, and I rinsed the liquid and sugar out, back into the kettle. This gave me a sweet solution called “wort,” which rhymes with “squirt.” Then I boiled the solution with hops and drained it into a fermenting container. After the first fermentation, I could choose to move it to a big bottle, or carboy, and let it finish.

This is how I remember it, anyway.

With an AIO, you dump the grain and water into the machine and leave it there until you move it to the fermenter. It controls the mashing temperatures and times (there may be several for one batch). When mashing is done, you remove the grain and boil the wort with hops and whatever else you want. The machine has a timer. Then you cool the wort, put it in a fermenter, and add your yeast. This is called “pitching.”

You end up with less stuff to wash, and you don’t have to stand next to the kettle all day. The electronics prevent a lot of fussing with a clock, turkey fryer, and thermometer.

Here is what people say: AIO’s don’t make better beer; they make better brew days.

I plan to make an ale I named “Senseless Cruelty.” Maybe I’ll change that. It’s a high-IBU (bitter) ale like an IPA. I chose it because this is the only beer I ever fermented at room temperature. To ferment cooler, I will need another fridge or a fermenter that will fit in the little one I have. I expect to put the fermenter on the garage floor. Sometimes fermentations go too fast, and things leak, so I want to make my return to brewing with a safe approach.

In order to be ready on Sunday, I need to make a yeast starter today. I have yeast, so I have to boil some yeast extract in a flask and add yeast. Then I’ll let it ferment until I brew. The more yeast you have when you pitch, the less likely a problem is.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I look forward to seeing what the purpose is.

Time to Slide Down my Own Chimney

Saturday, December 17th, 2022

Be Absent-Minded and Be Your Own Secret Santa

Should you buy yourself Christmas presents?

When I got out of law school, I was a disgrace. I only owned one pistol! It’s embarrassing to admit it. I owned a Glock I bought in case I had to kill one of my sister’s friends. This is true. I’m not trying to be funny.

She was enraged about something I did to help her, so she threatened to send some male junkie friends to take care of me. I got myself a Glock 22 and put my worries behind me. Fortunately for her low-life friends, none of them ever showed up to test my marksmanship, and I never had to go through the trauma of putting bullets into a human being. After that buy, I let myself down by letting maybe 9 years pass without another pistol purchase.

A Glock 22 is not a .22, by the way.

When I left school, I got myself a graduation gift. I went to Garcia’s National Gun in Little Havana and picked up a Smith & Wesson 686+ 7-shot, 6″ revolver in .357 Magnum. Very nice. Satin stainless with Hogue grips.

I frequented Garcia’s because I had bought into the myth that one should support local gun dealers. I bought several more guns from this place, and every time I showed up, they treated me like a stranger, perhaps because I wasn’t a Cuban. After that, I learned to love Internet shopping.

Yelp says Garcia’s is gone, which is not a surprise. Here is a quotation from a review a lady wrote:

“If you are not a 50+ year old Cuban guy you are invisible to these people. Terrible service. They treat you like you’re not there to spend money. I will take my business elsewhere.”

That is exactly how I felt. I would stand in the store while they talked to their pals en espanol, waiting to for my existence to be noticed so I could give them $700 or $1300 or whatever. It looks like their customer base decided to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

I think the revolver is the only present I’ve ever bought myself. I have certainly bought things for myself, but I don’t think I’ve bought myself anything for a special occasion.

Actually, I just remembered one, so I’m wrong. I bought a 2003 Ford Thunderbird and took delivery the day after my birthday. It was a silly, frivolous car, but I really enjoyed it.

I guess that counts. Sort of. I mean, I had to buy some kind of car, and I would have done it even if it had been during a different month.

Okay. It doesn’t count

Rhodah and I went to Singapore recently, and of course, I bought her stuff. She is still catching up from a lifetime of poverty. We bought clothes. We bought a nice Bric’s suitcase. There were other things. She managed to squeeze a big perfume donation out of me while she was on her way to her flight and the duty-free shops.

During our trip, I got myself a Singapore ball cap in the Bugis Street bazaar, and I also got a Levi’s-brand belt because I left my own belt in Florida. The belt does not count. In the airport on the way home, I realized I had nearly nothing to show for my trip, so I spent 22 USD on a Singapore shirt.

In Ireland, I got myself a Dublin hoodie I will never wear. I would have gotten a T-shirt, but the Irish sell incredibly cheap shirts that can’t possibly last a year. In Turkey, I got a hat. In Egypt, nothing.

It’s hard to buy anything in Egypt that is not related to idolatry.

Egypt is not the greatest tourist destination. If you go, stay in a very nice hotel in Cairo and get guides to take you to the sights. Then take a Nile cruise with guides. Then go home. You won’t be able to drive, and there is nothing to do except look at pyramids and temples anyway. See the old stuff and enjoy a cruise. If you limit your trip to these things, you’ll love Egypt. Don’t do anything else.

I feel like getting myself something, but I am not doing well at finding gifts for myself.

When I got the idea of getting myself a present, I immediately thought of a trailer with a gas-powered leaf vacuum on it. That is not a Christmas gift. It’s a tool for yard maintenance. A CNC mill I don’t need would be a good gift. Something I really need so I can do chores would not.

I’m not blowing $8000 on a mill.

I looked at my Amazon lists. They’re full of things I need. There are also things I merely want, but those things are too cheap for Christmas.

I bought myself two Shark vacuums this month. Cordless and corded. Spent over $600. Changed my life. Absolutely worth every penny. Recommended without reservation. But cleaning tools are not gifts. And Rhodah will probably be the one who uses them most.

I feel like I’ve turned into the aunt who used to give me socks.

How about another firearm buy?

The other day I was on the phone, and I saw an unopened flat rate box. I opened it up, and it contained a new Wilson rifle cartridge trimmer. The invoice was from August of 2020. This thing cost me over $130, and I had forgotten I owned it. Obviously, I have not used it. I haven’t fired a gun in maybe 6 months. I have enough ammo supplies backed up to keep me busy for a couple of months. I built a rifle I have not fired yet. I finished it months ago. I probably have 15,000 rounds of .22 ammunition. I don’t think this is the time to buy gun stuff.

Maybe a nice bottle of XO brandy. I barely drink, but a really nice brandy would be pleasant to have on hand. I have not had a really good brandy since before I left Miami.

How about a water-cooled TIG torch? Practicing TIG is no fun when you’re holding a hot torch. A new one would cost a few pennies, but it would encourage me to practice.

I would love to have a Langmuir Arcflat welding table, three feet by four feet. My Northern Tool table is astounding for the money, but it has about half the square footage of a Langmuir. I’m doing a project which is not going to fit on my table. It would hang off the ends and sides of a Langmuir, but I think I could make it work.

It would be great to have a table 6 feet long. You can weld nearly anything on a table like that.

A Langmuir fixturing table 4 feet long would cost more than I want to spend, sadly. It would be $1800, including tax. Cut that figure in thirds, and I might do it.

Like a leaf vaccum, a welding table is useful for necessary jobs, but you can also use one to make fun things like a shooting bench or a mobile base for a big table saw you don’t really need. I don’t think I’d put it in the same class as a leaf vacuum.

I’m going to try to get by without a vacuum. Today I took my giant blower and made a 10-foot-wide pile of leaves at the side of the front yard. I plan to burn them as soon as I can get a permit. In the past, I was determined to move leaves out of the yard before burning them, and that’s why I never got anywhere. Moving them an eighth of a mile to the burn pile is extremely work-intensive. If I am willing to have a black spot in my yard, I should be able to get rid of them without extraordinary effort.

I guess I’ve already bought myself nearly everything that would make a good present. I have a drawer full of nice knives. I have a Ruger RPR with a Vortex Viper scope. I have an ice cream machine with its own compressor. I have a 16″ lathe. Years ago, I got myself musical instruments.

To some men, or women who have a lot of jewelry, this stuff may seem insignificant, especially when spread out over decades, but I don’t live on a grand scale. I drive a Ford Explorer with 60,000 miles on it, and I plan to keep it for 10 more years. I use a cell phone made in 2017. I own a Rolex, but if my late father had not owned it, I would not have one. If I spend $500 on something, I feel like it’s a big deal.

A home waterjet would be nice. Really nice. Let’s see. A Wazer, the best-known small waterjet, would only set me back maybe 12 grand.

Dang it.

How about a plasma table? Let’s see. Over $1500. Geez.

I may as well clean up the brandy snifters.

Slung

Thursday, December 1st, 2022

Jethro Takes His Self a Trip

I’ll tell you what. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a 30-hour plane trip.

I got home from Singapore this morning, and I haven’t slept in quite a while. My wife and I had a great time there, but the flights were really something.

Singapore is so far away from me, it doesn’t matter which direction the jets take. They could go north, south, east, or west and get there in about the same amount of time, as long as they didn’t run into fuel problems. My flights to Singapore flew east, and so did my flights home.

The web says Singapore is around 10,700 miles away, so it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the globe. The time difference is 13 hours in the fall. Until this trip, I had no idea two time zones could differ by 13 hours.

My first international flight took off from JFK and landed in Doha. It took off pretty late. It should have been empty, right? Well, it turns out Doha is hosting an event you may have heard of: the FIFA World Cup. An event of which I took no notice because I’m not the kind of person who cares about millionaires kicking a ball into a net.

People from Latin America were shoehorned into the plane’s every crevice. The aisle seat I had carefully chosen in hopes of getting an empty row turned out to be a waste of money.

Actually, I didn’t get to sit next to an empty seat on any of my flights. Not even the 15-hour one from Singapore to San Francisco.

I was spoiled when we traveled during the covid statistical hump. I got to lie down across rows of seats. People were terrified of flying, and Rhodah and I reaped the benefits. It looks like those days are gone. We flew on the slowest days of the week, and every plane was still packed.

I know this will sound insensitive, but I miss the slow tourist traffic of the pandemic. We flew on empty planes. We didn’t have to wait in line at restaurants. We had the Great Pyramid to ourselves. Looks like those days are gone, unless the black death makes a comeback.

What can I say about Singapore?

I was afraid it would be unpleasant because I hear bad things about Far Eastern destinations. I thought it would be like Blade Runner crossed with Slumdog Millionaire, sort of. I was afraid the people would be hard and selfish, and I was concerned about the weather. Singapore is nearly on top of the Equator.

Here is how I would describe Singapore now: it’s a little bit like Miami would be if the people were vaporized and replaced with better ones.

Singapore is very orderly. The streets are clean, and there is a great deal of beautiful, meticulous landscaping in public areas. People obey the traffic laws, which seems weird given the large number of ethnic Chinese. Everything is built well. Signs are in English, probably because there are three major ethnic groups, each with its own language. Or languages. Whatever.

The people in Singapore are very polite and helpful. We experienced nearly no rudeness. There is nearly no crime in Singapore.

Singapore is also wealthy. They have stores like Chanel and Bulgari everywhere. They have impressive skyscrapers. The cars are generally clean, dent-free, and relatively new.

There is food everywhere in Singapore. There are so many restaurants, it’s hard to understand how they can all make money.

The hotels are very nice. Ours was just about perfect. Spotless and quiet, with several restaurants and a gym. I think there was also a pool in there somewhere.

I just realized I forgot to tip the maid. Dang.

That’s okay, though, because tipping is not customary in Singapore.

Here’s something weird: the weather in Singapore is better than the weather in Miami. It doesn’t get really hot, and the island is in a breezy location.

Now I will digress and tell the world about a high school history teacher who told me a tremendous number of baldfaced lies. His name was Morgan Kelly. I guess it’s okay to mention his name, because he has surely been dead for at least 20 years.

My prep school taught grades 7 through 12, and when I arrived in grade 9, Mr. Kelly was already a legend among the core group of students who had started two years earlier. He was an amateur sailor. He had a lanyard with a spliced monkey’s fist for a keychain. He wore green coach’s shorts every day. He sounded like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. He taught history.

Mr. Kelly impressed the younger kids by telling the time by looking at the sun. He claimed he could nail it within a few minutes. He would point at the sun with his extended left hand, look down his arm, pause briefly, and make his estimate. Over and over, he amazed the kids by proving to be right.

By the time they were sophomores, they started to realize his watch was on his left wrist.

Anyway, Mr. Kelly told all sorts of lies.

He claimed he was a tail gunner in World War Two. Ordinarily, I would not doubt a claim like that, but because I know he lied about other things, I don’t know whether he was really a tail gunner or even if he served.

He said that when he arrived at the place where they sorted out bomber crew trainees, the men were told to form a long line ordered by height. I would guess Mr. Kelly was about 5’4″ tall. Everyone at Mr. Kelly’s end had to become tail gunners because only short people could fit in the gunners’ stations.

Is this really how tail gunners were selected? I wonder. Maybe it’s true. Mr. Kelly had thick glasses, which means he wasn’t capable of the job, but maybe his eyes went bad after the war.

How likely is it that my school checked his military record? They might have checked to see if he had an honorable discharge, but I can’t imagine them asking for anything beyond that. I doubt they checked his record at all. They would have asked for his college credentials, but they wouldn’t have needed his military information.

I don’t think he was ever in a bomber, because he would have told us war stories.

He told a huge lie about the Chinese military.

He said he was on a troop plane going over the Himalayas, and there were Chinese soldiers on board.

Okay, right away you can see some issues.

Why would they fly troops over the Himalayas? It would be unbelievably expensive, not to mention dangerous. They would have moved troops with ships and trains.

Why would Chinese troops be on a plane with American bomber crewmen?

Okay, so now we get to the part I am sure is a lie. He said several Chinese were playing a game of chance. I think he said they were throwing down cards. He said they would play a round of their game, look at the results, grab one person who was playing, and throw him out the side door. While the plane was in flight.

We believed it. We were kids.

Of course, the Chinese military did not permit soldiers to murder each other in card games. This should not have to be explained to anyone. You can’t win a war by throwing your troops out of airplanes. Also, even if the game were permitted, how would you find people willing to play? If you did, how would you get enough men onto one plane to play the game? If you have to throw a man out after every hand, and you have 20 men, your game will last around 20 minutes. Not a great way to kill time on a plane.

Even if all the obstacles mentioned above were overcome, why would American servicemen sit and do nothing while people were thrown out of a plane?

So, yes, he was a big liar.

Here comes the lie he told about Singapore.

The British were building a bridge in Singapore. It was 120° Fahrenheit every day. The workers had to work outdoors, obviously, but at night they slept in air-conditioned barracks.

They were only able to cool the barracks to 90°, but it seemed so cold after working in 120° heat, the men had to wear winter coats indoors.

Lie number 1: 120° heat in Singapore. It doesn’t happen. It rarely goes above 92°, and that’s something you can’t say about Miami.

Lie number 2: men who found the 90° temperature in the barracks too cold would solve the problem by wearing winter coats. No. They would adjust the temperature.

I don’t know why Mr. Kelly lied to kids so much. I took Ancient History and Ancient Chinese History with him, and I guess I can discard everything he taught us.

I didn’t sweat much at all in Singapore. It was surprisingly comfortable. Rhodah, however, was shocked by the humidity. Apparently, Zambia doesn’t have any. In the past, she had heard me complain about the humidity in Florida, but she had no idea what I was talking about until we went to Singapore. We went to Egypt, which was hot but dry. We went to Turkey and Ireland, where the weather was cool. In Singapore, she suddenly understood why people buy anti-perspirant.

I just remembered another lie Mr. Kelly told.

Americans needed to land planes somewhere in China. There was no runway. The ground was covered with rocks. Fortunately, China was incredibly full of human beings. Their numbers were astounding.

The mayor of the city where the runway was needed told the people who lived there to go and stand where the runway had to go. Then he told them to pick up one rock each and leave. They did, and the runway instantly appeared.

I don’t know how we fell for that one. Having a lot of people doesn’t really get you past the problem that you can fit hundreds of rocks into the area one person takes up. Pick up one rock, and you still have hundreds more.

Man, that guy lied.

Another Mr. Kelly lie just popped into my head.

Some ancient Chinese pottery manufacturer had a slave, and one day, the slave got trapped in his kiln and burned to death. When the kiln was opened, the pots had a magnificent red color. The manufacturer couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the color, so he decided to throw a slave into the kiln every time he made red pots.

I’m starting to think we were really stupid.

Okay, Google and see if you can find this story, or any story about the ancient Chinese having a really gorgeous and highly prized red pottery glaze. I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. After that, try to find a story that mentions the part about murdering slaves.

Then ask yourself how many pots you would have to sell to pay for one expensive slave. And why use a slave when you could use a dead body or a pig or goat? Dead bodies would have been pretty easy to come by in ancient China or ancient anywhere.

How does a slave get stuck in a pottery kiln? Why wouldn’t he yell for someone to let him out?

I knew someone who served in Iraq, and he had a photo of himself shivering in a sleeping bag in a very hot room. He said the hot room seemed cold to him. Soldiers there wore a lot of hot gear, and the daytime temperatures sometimes broke 120°, so for all I know, the photo wasn’t a gag. But it never happened in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Soldiers love jokes and pranks.

The food picture in Singapore is interesting. Nice restaurants and well-known restaurants there are unbelievably expensive, like $40 for Five Guys or $400 for two at Ruth’s Chris. On the other hand, there are cheaper places where locals eat, and they are real bargains.

It appears there are three types of restaurants in Singapore. Independent establishments, food court restaurants, and food center restaurants.

By “independent,” I mean restaurants that are separate from other restaurants. Food courts are about like American food courts, except the restaurants are jammed together very tightly, and a typical food court will have a huge number of them.

A food center is a concrete building with a roof and no exterior walls. Inside, there will be long concrete structures broken into stalls. Each stall will be around 8 feet wide, and most food center restaurants occupy one stall.

Between the rows of stalls there will be sturdy plastic tables and seats which are fixed to the floor.

You can get an incredible assortment of foods and beverages at a food center. Malay. Cantonese. Sichuan. Indian. A typical entree will run around 5 Singapore dollars, and that amounts to about 4 US dollars. Some stalls sell excellent food. Some sell food that is merely good. Some sell stuff you will prefer to discard.

If you want to eat well and adventurously in Singapore while saving a ton of money, food centers are the way to go. The trick is to keep ordering things until you find things you like. The initial investment may be $20 or so per person, but it will pay off in the end by helping you avoid unnecessary experimentation.

One tip: don’t go to the stall Anthony Bourdain recommends. His photo is still on the window. Bourdain was not a great cook, as he admitted, and his advice about food is not reliable. He went to the stall in question and ordered something called Hainanese chicken rice. He raved about it as though it had made the earth move for him, and Gordon Ramsay’s face also appears on the window on a sticker.

The stall usually has a long line of people waiting for chicken. There was a line on the day when we stupidly listened to Bourdain and Ramsay.

Hainanese chicken rice is basically a boiled or possibly baked chicken cutlet, skin on, sliced, and dumped across rice made with chicken broth. It is served lukewarm. It is limp. It tastes not quite as good as what you would get if you boiled chicken in Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I am not exaggerating. It is worthless.

It may be that Chinese people who are raised on it like it. There is a big difference between authentic Chinese food and much of the Chinese food Chinese people make in America.

After we tried the chicken rice, I bought myself a Tiger Crystal beer (very good) from another vendor and told him the food was basically garbage. He agreed. He said all the people in line were tourists who had been fooled. He said the chicken rice was no good. He very kindly led me to another stall, where he recommended laksa, a pho-like dish with rice noodles, shrimp, and some kind of meat. Much better.

We liked the Maxwell Food Centre and the Albert Food Centre. There are others.

If you go to a food center, buy a package of paper towels and a package of antiseptic wipes first. Food stalls don’t provide napkins, and the tables and seats are often in need of cleaning.

I would advise avoiding fancy American chain restaurants. We tried Lawry’s, for example, and it was just plain bad. I think Asians sometimes copy the appearance of American food without capturing anything else.

We had Egg McMuffins in Singapore, because we had to, and they were good but not quite as good as American. They don’t toast the bread enough. We tried Five Guys, and it was better than American because they made the fries correctly. I think the reason is that they hire conscientious Singaporeans instead of American high school slackers who can’t be bothered to follow the formula.

We didn’t go in for sights much. The famous Marina Bay Sands, which is three buildings joined by a pool that runs across them at the top, did not get Rhodah excited enough to pay the $23.50 cost of going up for a look. She was pretty excited about the high-end mall at the bottom, however, much to my chagrin.

We visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens. If you want to see what Asians can do with gardening and landscaping, this is the place for you. All sorts of perfectly-tended plants and trees. They also have some weird wildlife. We walked right up on some kind of monitor rooting for food, and it didn’t mind us being there at all. We also saw some red jungle fowl, which are supposedly pre-domestication chickens. There are otters in the gardens, but they didn’t show.

The gardens has a huge orchid area. Pretty impressive, if orchids are your thing.

We went to the National Museum. It’s very small, and you can get in and out in less than an hour. They had some interesting exhibits, but not a whole lot has happened in Singapore, so there was a limit to what they could do.

We had a very satisfying trip in spite of Singapore’s limitations. It’s an extremely comfortable city to stay in. It will spoil you.

While I was there, I came to a crazy realization: I don’t actually hate cities. I hate AMERICAN cities, because of the people who live in them. Our cities accumulate the worst we have to offer. Singapore isn’t like that. You don’t have to be bullied by entitled homeless people or frightened by potential muggers. People don’t ignore you or abuse you. You can walk around at night and not worry that you’re in a neighborhood where your presence is considered consent to beatings, robbery, racist behavior, or rape.

There is no Antifa in Singapore. There are no self-pitying street murals that condemn the police while ignoring the people who do nearly all the damage.

I could live in Singapore without going crazy. I could even stand not being allowed to carry a pistol.

While the subject of bad behavior is on my mind, I may as well mention a remarkable conversation I had today. My aunt said a bunch of horrible things about me.

My aunt is in charge of some things related to my grandparents’ estates, and I am not very happy with the job she is doing, or, in my view, not doing. Everything should have been sold and distributed many years ago, but a few assets are sitting around doing nothing, and I would like to have my financial connections to my family cut. I’m just tired of being involved in it. I’m not very concerned about the money.

My aunt has Parkinson’s, and dementia is one thing Parkinson’s can cause. I can’t diagnose anyone, but I am wondering if she is getting close to the point where some decisions have to be made regarding her care and that of her husband. Today I had to tell him over and over who I was. I told him his wife had three sisters and I was the son of the eldest. I told him I was his nephew. I told him I was his wife’s nephew.

Anyway, she started the conversation by angrily criticizing me for being unavailable to discuss a deal involving a property. I received a text from her in Singapore, and I responded when I saw it, saying I was in the process of flying home and would try to get back to her the following day. She was very angry at me for taking the trip! This is someone who has never spoken angrily to me until this year, so it was strange to hear the tone of her voice and the openness of the hostility.

I didn’t get that at all. I said I had taken a vacation, and she demanded to know who takes a foreign vacation in winter, as though it was a hostile act no decent person would perform. She was seething. Why? She said, “I hope you had a nice time!” Still angry. I said, “I did!”

I have complained to her this year about her failure to take certain steps to get things sold. I have never been nasty to her, and I have never insulted her. I have been blunt, though, and Southerners don’t always take that well. It’s a serious failing we have. Often, we prefer to be passive-aggressive and treacherous. Smile in your face; stab you in the back later. Being blunt is like violating an unwritten code or something. It’s not done.

She said she needed to apologize for saying nasty things about my religious beliefs. She said she apologized wholeheartedly. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said so, and that I accepted her apology anyway.

So has she been making fun of my beliefs to the family? I don’t know. When I have talked to her about my beliefs in the past, she has generally given me the impression that she was right there with me. I took her expressions of agreement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t have any reason to think she contemned my faith.

I don’t really care about this stuff. A bunch of family members are long dead, and the rest greatly reduced their involvement with my dad and me over a decade ago, so I haven’t been part of their circle in a very long time.

I wonder if we see things differently. Maybe it would bother her a lot to find out I had criticized her faith to the family, so she assumes I would be upset if she had done the same thing to me. I don’t really think or care about what they say about me, though. I have so many things to think about.

I’m just guessing here. Maybe there is no rational explanation.

Bizarrely, she accused me of taking off to Egypt to see if I could find a wife to come home with me. She, whose son is on wife three, was saying I was a loser with women. I was amazed. Where did that come from? How long had she been holding it in? Why did she pick Egypt? Does she know I went to Egypt? Why would anyone go to Egypt to get a wife? I can’t imagine a worse place, unless it’s the area where my family comes from.

I now know she doesn’t know I’m married. I didn’t correct her. I didn’t think it would help.

I have tried to get her to list properties on the web for sale, and I have mentioned the fact that I manage properties and have sold some. I guess she did not like that, because she blurted out, “My property is worth much more than yours!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her what she meant. I think she was saying she had a bunch of rental properties that were worth more than what I have.

I don’t have any idea what she has, and she has no idea what I have.

She said everyone else in the family had planned for retirement and I had not. Where she got this idea is a mystery.

Apparently, she thought I was trying to get her to liquidate things because I was desperate for money. I said, “Do you think I’m poor?” She said, “Fine. You’re filthy rich!” So first she wanted to insult me by saying I had nothing, and then, I think, she wanted to make me feel bad for bragging about being rich. Which I didn’t do!

She said she had her treasures, which were her grandchildren, and she said I had no one, except my sorry dog. What?? I didn’t know where to go with that. I said I didn’t have a dog.

I never said anything rude. For example, I didn’t try to come up with a snappy comeback about her pets.

She said the family was going to do whatever it wanted with or without me, so of course, I asked her why she had called me. What is the point of asking for my support when it doesn’t matter? She said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is not true at all.

I told her I would never sue or contact the attorney general or anything along those lines, because I’m a Christian and I don’t intend to live that way. But I’m not going to say things are going well when I think they’re not.

I said she needed to advertise properties on the web, like everyone else does now. She said she was in “the hot spot,” meaning the frantic world of undesirable Eastern Kentucky rural real estate. She wanted me to know she knew more than I did. She then told me I was ashamed of my people and my culture, which seems irrelevant. I think she was telling me I did not understand the mysterious and unique methods of selling property up there.

I AM ashamed of my people and my culture! Every mature person who has come out of Eastern Kentucky is ashamed of the people and the culture. I used to be proud of my roots, but I was deluded. Immaturity, racism, illegitimacy, toothlessness, violence, adultery, drugs, generations of welfare recipients, hatred of learning…yes, of course I’m ashamed of my people. I didn’t say so, however.

I’m ashamed of being like them in counterproductive ways.

I used to love Eastern Kentucky, but the smart people left a long time ago. For years, my aunt has tried to promote the area as unappreciated and full of brains and talent, but that’s not even a little bit true.

Think about Singapore. In 1965, it had to start out as a new nation. It was poor. It was in the middle of nowhere. Now they call it the Switzerland of Asia. Money everywhere. A harbor full of ships. A highly educated populace. Skyscrapers. Safety.

Now think of Eastern Kentucky. It’s loaded with coal. All they had to do was keep their mineral rights, sell the coal, develop other industries, and invest, and it would have become the Kuwait of Appalachia. Instead, they sold their inheritances to outsiders and became their laborers. They never built a decent university. No infrastructure. No industry other than coal. They kept their corrupt politics and courts. They held onto racism. They fell in love with handouts. They planted marijuana patches full of booby traps. Since 1965, Eastern Kentucky has gotten worse.

Yes. Sure. I’m ashamed of it. Why would I not be?

Maybe “ashamed” is the wrong word. I’m critical of it. I am honest about it. I reject a lot of it.

She went on to accuse my parents of being ashamed of it. That’s true. They were. They didn’t try to disguise themselves or cure their accents, but they were realistic. My dad used to quote Kentucky author Harry Caudill, who said that everybody who had any get-up-and-go got up and went.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew or knew of. He flew all over the country representing companies like PPG, UPS, and Nabisco before the NLRB and the federal appellate courts. He was the head of litigation in one of Florida’s top firms at the age of 33, three years after joining as an associate.

My mother loved classical music. She read. She loved good restaurants and trips to Europe.

What were they supposed to do in Eastern Kentucky? My dad wrote a brief for my grandfather once, and my grandfather told him it was too good for the judges up there.

Since my beliefs have been mentioned, I’ll talk about some of them.

I am certain everyone has demons. They are around us all the time, influencing, or trying to influence, our hearts and minds. Many of the thoughts, desires, and emotions we think are ours really come from demons, and some, in some people, come from the Holy Spirit.

Demons use people to express themselves and fulfill their desires. They give us habits and leanings. Some try to turn us into the people they would be if they had bodies. They get us to wear things they like. They get us to cut ourselves up and get tattoos.

They manifest in things like overeating, pornography, rage, depression, delusions, to name a few.

I believe that when people become demented, the demons get promotion. Before dementia sets in, people resist them to a certain extent. They also cover their influence up, pretending to be nicer and better than they really are. Once the host loses the ability to steer things, he or she becomes more like the demons.

My grandmother liked to boss people. She covered it up when she was young and able, but she became demented, and one day, she announced, “I want to be the boss!” I believe that was her demons talking. Sometimes my dad, who had vascular dementia, would curse me for no reason and then forget instantly. I think that was demonic, too.

Now my aunt is fading, and she seems like a different person. Maybe she is a different person. Maybe other beings are finally getting to spit poison at me, after veiling their feelings for decades. She used to tell me she admired me. She tried to impress me, probably because I grew up in cities and had more sophistication than the rest of the family. She’s done with that now.

God has told me all kinds of brilliant things, which makes sense, because he is God. He told me this: “Things get better, or things get worse.”

It sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it’s important. Every day, you improve or deteriorate. You never stand still and remain unchanged. Nothing does, except God. Troubled people who don’t know the Holy Spirit deteriorate. Whatever is wrong in their hearts and minds gets worse.

God brings improvement and order. Where God is absent, rot and chaos are unstoppable. God told me this: “Bring order.”

I’ve talked to Rhodah about my family, and she feels the same way I do. Don’t sue. Don’t turn anyone in. Don’t wade into the food fight. The amounts at stake are too small to make a real difference in our lives, and getting into unforgiveness and juvenile squabbling would take all the joy out of life.

Paul said it was better to suffer wrong than to take another Christian to court. I would only call one or two of my relatives Christians, but I think Paul’s advice applies anyway. If anything is taken from me, God will repay it with interest, and He will be pleased that I’m pursuing his presence instead of playing verbal laser tag with people who are in real supernatural trouble.

We have been praying for my family. It doesn’t seem to help them. I don’t know what else we can do. I thought about contacting relatives to raise awareness about my aunt’s condition, but they know already, and nothing is being done.

It seems likely a very abrupt move to assisted living is in her near future, and I am told nothing is being done to prepare. If she’s angry with me for questioning her actions as my fiduciary, you have to wonder how she will handle assisted living staff telling her what socks to wear.

It’s very unfortunate. I used to have a great relationship with her. I don’t see that being restored any time soon. If my grandfather had done a better job planning his estate, maybe the family would still be whole.

At least I can say I never took advantage of any of the others. I’m not the world’s finest person, but I have managed to avoid that.

Why do They Call it an Aftermath?

Thursday, September 29th, 2022

I See no Math

Here is my final update on Hurricane Ian: absolutely nothing happened here. A couple of buckets blew across the yard. We have had a long spell of continuous light rain, nowhere near the one-foot-plus we were supposed to get. That’s it.

Because hurricanes spin counterclockwise, a storm that passes you on the east will bring you hot, wet air at first and then cool, dry air from the north. That’s happening here now. We are set to have a glorious week of cool, dry weather. Unusually good for early October. Apart from the fresh crop of post-hurricane mosquitoes, things could not be better.

I don’t have regular TV, because I hate it. That means I am not seeing what everyone else in our TV-addicted nation is seeing. I only see little bits of it as they pop up while I look at the web. It wasn’t until last night that I started to see a lot of video about the destruction Ian did in other parts of Florida. I haven’t seen much of anything about Cuba.

Now that the storm is over for me, I am looking at stories about other places. Lee County’s sheriff is claiming hundreds of deaths. Can that really be true? In 2022, it’s not that easy for an American to die in a hurricane. The government knocks itself out providing transportation and shelters, and hurricanes generally aren’t that dangerous to begin with. The winds kill very few people. The big threat is storm surge, which can drown people who don’t evacuate. The people in Lee County knew the water was predicted to rise high enough to kill them, so it’s hard for me to believe hundreds of them chose not to move to high ground.

When you live inland, there is no such thing as storm surge, so the main danger from hurricanes doesn’t exist.

I didn’t expect anyone in the US to experience the kind of catastrophe the sheriff is talking about. I thought there might be a lot of property damage and economic loss, but I didn’t think anyone would drown. We know how to prevent that. Now I’m hearing that while I was having a pretty good time, grilling burgers and eating junk food, other people may have been drowning or waiting on rooftops for rescue boats.

Truthfully, I think it’s a big mistake to live in any hurricane-prone area. From Texas to the Carolinas, coastal people know they will get hit sooner or later. The pleasure of being near the water is not worth the unending flow of tense pre-hurricane vigils or the pain of cleaning up when storms actually hit.

I have been through Betsy, Katrina, Wilma, Rita, and Irma in one way or another, and I have also spent a bunch of weeks watching other storms that didn’t reach me. All in all, I wish I had been in Tennessee or some other nice place where people aren’t afraid of the weather.

The place where I live is about as unsafe as I can stand. We haven’t had hurricane winds since 1885, but we sometimes get tropical storm winds that cause serious inconvenience, and that’s bad enough. I would never accept a higher level of risk again. I would never live close to a coast.

My wife and I were discussing our pleasant fate today, and I had an interesting thought. In the Bible, people who knew they were in danger fasted and prayed. They repented and humbled themselves. They knew this was how to get God’s help. America is full of Christians who think they know the Bible, but virtually no one calls for repentance, prayer, and fasting when we face a threat.

I fasted and prayed because of the storm, and I came out fine. That shouldn’t surprise me. Why hasn’t every Christian done it? Many times I, myself, have failed to do it. How can we make such an obvious mistake?

Look at our teachers. They are at fault. The Catholics teach us to pray to statues, dead people who have no power, and a mere woman, and they tell us God rarely helps anyone. Cessationists tell us we have to work hard and fix our own problems because while Satan is happy to continue doing supernatural works, God has quit. Prosperity preachers teach us we get eternal security by raising our hands once in church, and they tell us God will make us rich for buying them jets. Almost nobody is teaching anything helpful, and most preachers are teaching lies that cripple us.

I don’t feel guilty about sailing through Ian without a care. I am supposed to receive blessings. It’s not something to feel guilty about. We are supposed to strive to receive and share God’s blessings. Why else would we worship Him? What would be the point? Feeling bad about being blessed makes no sense. You’re just getting what you asked for. Other people should ask, too.

Jesus paid for my help with his body and blood and kingdom. It’s terrible that so many other people had devastating outcomes, but I’m not responsible. I want to continue being blessed and protected, even if everyone else on Earth is destroyed. I pray for people and help them, and I want to see them get the best things they can, but sinking with them won’t help anyone.

Now I will get back to making my tractor attachment and making travel plans. I should be done with hurricanes for one year.